HYDRA had chased Steve and Natasha for days, across countries, through shattered safehouses and silenced allies.
Steve Rogers stood tense and frustrated. "Soren, HYDRA's taken SHIELD completely."
"They've corrupted it from the inside. And now they're about to activate something called Insight, a system that'll murder millions before they even lift a finger."
"They'll kill anyone who could threaten them. Anyone they think might one day stand against them. Politicians. Scientists. Kids."
Soren didn't look up. He was seated cross-legged in midair, the pieces of Zola's mind rotating slowly around him like a shattered solar system.
"Insight." He repeated, as if tasting the word. "How poetic. Murder disguised as foresight."
Steve took a breath, trying to keep calm. "We can't stop it alone."
"You've seen what's buried in Zola's code. You know what they're planning."
Soren smiled faintly, but the expression didn't reach his eyes.
"I know exactly what they're planning."
"And I also know it's not my concern."
That silenced Steve. Natasha shifted slightly behind him, hand twitching near her hip. Not reaching for a weapon, just ready.
"I've already done my part." Soren continued, fingers weaving through the air.
"Fury's alive. Coulson too. Their lives were the last threads I cared about in your little web."
Steve's voice turned urgent. "But millions~"
"If it comes to that." Soren interrupted.
"I will deal with it. You don't need to drag me into your war."
Steve stared at him, jaw tight. He wanted to argue. Wanted to make him see.
But, Soren's eyes told him this was the end of the conversation.
The silence stretched before Steve finally gave a quiet nod.
"...Understood. Then we'll stop it without you."
Soren didn't answer. He was already lost again in Zola's fractured mind.
Later
When they were gone, Soren didn't move for a long time.
The cold wind moaned softly through the broken ceiling. Snow drifted down, settling on lifeless equipment, on long-forgotten HYDRA schematics, on crumpled notebooks full of madness.
And around him, Zola's memories turned like satellites.
1934: Arnim Zola shaking hands with Schmidt.
1943: The first prototypes of Tesseract weaponry.
1972: The core upload. His 'immortality.' Decades of secrets. Thousands of dead faces.
Soren's eyes narrowed. He twisted his hand, and the fragments collapsed together, spiraling into a single glowing thread of data.
The Zola Equation.
It wasn't encrypted. Not truly.
In Zola's time, firewalls were simple and ego was massive. It took Soren only three days to clean the mind, discarding dream fragments, personal obsessions, irrelevant memories of meals and meetings.
What remained… was this.
A formula.
Elegant in its simplicity, but brutal in application.
Zola's brilliance had turned the impossible into code, an algorithm capable of drawing energy directly from the Tesseract's cosmic lattice.
And his only thought was how to turn it into a weapon.
"Crude." Soren murmured. "Typical."
He ran a hand through the code. With a wave, he conjured a projection, a glowing cube of blue energy hovering in his palm. A fraction of the Tesseract's pulse, simulated perfectly.
He adjusted the variables. The energy flared.
"So much potential... and all you could see was death."
And Zola had tried to tame it with equations of fear.
But now... now it was in his hands.
A slow smile spread across Soren's face, the quiet satisfaction of discovery.
"Let's see what secrets you still hide."
He placed his hand into the cube, and everything lit up.
The light from the Tesseract flared violently, blue and white lightning lashing through the room like angry serpents. The energy was too raw, too wild.
Even in his gloved hand, space itself seemed to ripple, warping the air into jagged waves.
"Unstable." Soren muttered, eyes narrowed. "Not responsive to will. It's like trying to sculpt wildfire."
A jagged tear opened in midair, a glimpse into something vast and blacker than death.
For one breathless second, he saw movement inside the void, something ancient shifting in the dark, and then the rift snapped shut.
His heart pounded. His hand trembled.
Then it clicked, Time. Not in sequence, but as structure. He recalled his own use of the Time Gem: small loops, reality seals, compression sigils.
If time could be shaped, space could be anchored.
"Magic."
"That's the cage. Containment."
The door to the medical hall slammed shut.
He sealed it with six layers of enchantments, one nested inside the next, pulsing with silver runes. The outside world could wait.
For Three Days
Soren didn't eat. He barely breathed.
Magic circles bloomed and burned away in the air around him. Hundreds no, thousands of permutations shimmered and dissolved.
He drew with his fingers, with light, with his own blood when necessary. Each sigil was a language, a line of logic and power, binding the fundamental rules of space to the geometry of control.
The Tesseract pulsed at the center of the summoning circle, its energy too vast to measure, its presence like a sun wrapped in ice.
Zola's equation hung above it, rotating in three dimensions like a living script.
"If the Tesseract is the fuel." Soren muttered, fingers moving again.
"And the Zola equation the engine… then the array must be the driver."
Time passed strangely. Outside, the sun rose and fell, and storms came and went. Inside the medical hall, reality was bent so tightly around the experiment that the walls groaned with strain.
And… finally… success.
A single pulse echoed through the floor.
The room fell silent.
A newly completed magic circle hung midair, silver and violet, inscribed with runes no living mage had ever seen. It was beautiful.
Soren exhaled. His breath came in shallow gasps.
"Now."
He touched the circle. And unleashed it.
Space. Shattered.
"Space Crushing."
The words echoed like a verdict. Light bled from the Tesseract, searing through the circle. The room seemed to buckle inward, as if the very fabric of space folded like parchment.
A section of the air imploded, creating a hollow cavity of nothingness.
He could see through it, into blackness that had no bottom, no form.
"Space Shifting. Space Folding. Space Tearing."
Each invocation triggered a unique distortion.
In one moment, he touched the far side of the room without moving. In another, a table appeared cleaved and stitched together wrong, folded like a broken mirror.
Then came a jagged hole that opened into a void where sound did not exist.
If this had happened anywhere else, outside the protection of the medical hall's living enchantments, it would have shattered reality in a mile-wide radius.
Even here, the walls creaked.
When he finally ended the experiment, sweat poured down his face. His body ached.
"Too much... even now."
The Tesseract pulsed dimly at the heart of the collapsed circle, as if satisfied.
He grasped it, and it shrank, folding into itself with a sigh of displaced space.
He caught it in his hand and collapsed back against the wall.
In one hand, the Time Gem. In the other, the Space Gem.
The dual magic circles still floated faintly behind his eyes, like afterimages burned into his mind.
"Time and space."
"I felt it... the shape of existence. The strings in the universe."
A long pause. His lips curled into a faint smile.
"If one day I hold all six…"
"Recreation won't be a far off."
What would the system give him, when he owned all of it?
Meanwhile…
Captain America and Black Widow stood atop a safehouse, breathing the cold air. Below them, the last remnants of a loyal SHIELD cell were gathering.
Steve looked out across the rooftops, quiet for a long time.
"He won't help." Steve finally said. "Not unless the world's already ending."
Natasha shrugged. "Sounds like most people."
"He could've ended HYDRA today."
She gave him a look. "And what would you have done with that power if it was yours?"
Steve didn't answer.
Phil Coulson stood in a cold bunker, the Cube in his hands. Fury had trusted him with it. His team was fractured, but alive.
And behind him, a holomap flickered to life. Red zones marked HYDRA-controlled zones. It was spreading like a virus.
He looked at the cube, then back at the map.
"We're going to need a bigger miracle."
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream