After Ben left, Soren returned to the heart of the Everlife Medical Hall.
He moved among rows of glowing vials, adjusting settings on ancient crystalline instruments that pulsed, slow, sleeping hearts.
The sun dipped behind the skyline, and with it came silence.
A twitch in the ether.
A thread pulled taut in the weave of wards outside.
Soren paused, one brow lifting slightly as the runes etched on his teacup flickered.
Six. Moving fast. Not the front door.
The teacup clinked gently against its saucer as he set it down, amused.
"Bold little shadows."
"Let's see if you're worth the trouble."
With a thought, the spiritual fortress surrounding the Everlife Medical Hall, a protective field inscribed with elder stardust folded for a moment.
Not collapsed. Invited.
A trap.
The six figures slipped through the perimeter like well-oiled knives, dressed in matte-black stealth armor, their exoskeletons subtly humming with chemically enhanced musculature.
Orange-yellow veins pulsed faintly along their limbs, glowing where skin met synthetic flesh.
They didn't speak. Their body language was flawless. Coordinated.
Military. Eyes flicked in practiced rhythms. Targets identified. Entry pattern confirmed.
They advanced past the courtyard, past the koi pond that shimmered unnaturally beneath starlight, past the white statues whose eyes tracked them even without movement.
Inside, the medical hall smelled of parchment and something weird.
Old blood? Burnt ozone? Memory?
They reached the lobby.
And there he was.
Seated calmly on a low velvet sofa beneath an archway of flowering spiritwood, robes draped casually around him, Soren raised his teacup in one hand, barely glancing up.
"Quite the entrance." He swirled the tea. "For rats."
The assassins paused.
Their minds ticked rapidly. No weapons drawn, they didn't need them.
Their strength was engineered, their speed surgically enhanced. They could tear a tank open with their bare hands.
One look at Soren, this lean, half-bored man sipping from porcelain, and they made the same decision.
Terminate.
The leader snapped his hand forward.
They moved.
In unison, all six lunged, from the stairs, from the shadows, from above and behind. A blur of motion, faster than any human eye could track.
The floor cracked under the sudden shift of force. Wind roared from their wake.
Death moved with them.
Halfway across the room, something folded.
A ripple.
A stillness that seemed to devour the motion itself.
All six assassins froze mid-airm, bodies contorted in attack stances, limbs poised mid-strike.
Every nerve shouted in panic. They hovered there, statues caught between seconds.
Soren set his teacup down gently.
Only now did he look at them.
His eyes glowed faintly. Like ancient stars imploding behind them.
"Sloppy." He stood slowly, dusting off his hands. "You hid your scent, disguised your minds… But still human."
He walked toward them, taking measured steps, the sound of his shoes echoing far too loud in the silence.
"Tell me…did they promise you something? Power? Forgiveness? Immunity?" He stopped in front of the leader, his expression unreadable.
"Or did they just tell you I was killable?"
One of them, his eyes glassy with strain, let out a wet rasp as something moved beneath his flesh.
Soren's gaze narrowed.
He stepped forward silently, his eyes drawn not to their faces, but to a pale, segmented creature coiled tightly around one man's forearm like a grotesque centipede.
The thing had bored itself into the skin, its writhing claws sunk into muscle, feeding from within. Pale yellow, laced with pulsing veins of arterial red.
Extremis. But... Corrupted.
The host's breath grew ragged. His eyes widened.
A snap of heat.
His body glowed from the inside out.
"Mm." Soren raised a hand, fingers twitching lazily.
The room convulsed with a concussive pulse of force, focusing entirely on the man who had just lost control.
Boom!!!
The man erupted in a fiery explosion, of raw kinetic discharge, compressed into a narrow blast radius.
A moment later, the smoke cleared.
Where he'd once hung in the air, there was only scorched dust, already being drawn silently into the containment wards along the floor.
Completely erased.
"No control. One of Kilian's… but spliced with something dumber."
The five remaining soldiers twitched in terror, their enhanced bodies straining against the telekinetic hold. You could feel the panic building beneath their silence.
They were breaking…
"You all feel that," Soren murmured, more to himself than to them.
"You're burning up too. A candle lit at both ends. Must be… agonizing."
One of them whimpered.
Still, no one spoke.
Soren looked up now, eyes glowing dimly like distant stars on the edge of collapse. "You know what I hate more than assassins?"
The soldiers flinched.
"Silent assassins."
Another flick of his fingers.
A second figure seized up violently, his spine arcing in a grotesque spasm.
His body ballooned with thermal energy, light radiating from his veins, until he too detonated, shredded by the very force he was supposed to weaponize.
Booom!!!!
The scent of ionized blood mixed with metal.
The rest screamed, not from pain, but fear, wordless, primal sounds that echoed in the warded silence.
Still… nothing.
Then it happened.
One of them, the youngest, maybe, clenched his teeth so hard his gums bled. His body twitched violently, energy surging beyond containment.
He screamed.
" HAIL HYDRA!"
Boom!!!!!
Gone.
The final two detonated seconds later, their volatile bodies unable to hold out against the pressure. One tried to twist his mouth into a grin before death.
It didn't reach his eyes.
Soren stood still for a long moment.
Ash swirled gently in the controlled airflow.
With a flick of his wrist, he waved the residue into nothingness, the room left eerily pristine, like no one had ever stood there at all.
"Hail Hydra…" Soren sat back down and retrieving his tea.
"Where do they find these idiots?"
He sipped. The tea was still warm.
"They send walking bombs. I sent a janitor. We are not the same."
For a moment, he stared into the liquid, the light catching faint golden threads that floated lazily in the brew.
He thought of the last encounter, Max Dillon, crackling with fury, rebuilt and deluded.
And Deadpool, laughing through it all as he cut down one of HYDRA's secret base for his face back.
"Cut off one head, two more grow." That was the line, wasn't it?
Soren placed the cup down and leaned back, eyes closing briefly.
"They're getting desperate. Or stupid."
Either way, they were knocking again.
And that was starting to annoy him.
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream