As the meeting wound down, Nolan looked across the room without expression and restated the purpose plainly: any force, open or secret, was to lose all appetite for challenging them. Any faction or supervillain willing to attack the Japanese base would receive a violent response. Kill one, warn the rest.
With that order given, David's eyes lit up with a slow pulse of blue light. He reached into the Japanese network without ceremony, pulling the weight of surveillance cameras and raw data inward, already sorting and sifting, searching for traces the attackers had left behind and wherever they might be hiding now.
Mariko and the others waited for the right pause, then asked whether Nolan and Doom ought to meet the superpower mercenaries they had brought in. Nolan, genuinely curious, agreed without hesitation.
He and Doom walked side by side in their vibranium power armor, following Bucky through the corridors of the base until they reached a wide training ground deeper inside the facility.
The team appeared one at a time from various points across the floor. Four men and one woman, each carrying themselves differently, each clearly mid-exercise before the interruption.
Bucky stepped forward. There was a tightness in his jaw that he was trying to keep off his face.
"Everyone, stop warm-up training for now. Come and gather together."
They responded immediately, dropping what they were doing and forming a clean line along the far edge of the training ground. Whatever their individual eccentricities, their discipline was evident.
Bucky walked Nolan through each of them in turn.
"This is Niwa. Codename: Weather Witch." He gestured toward a young woman near the center of the line. She was lean, with short hair framing a face that gave nothing away. Her eyes moved over Nolan's armor slowly and carefully, the way someone takes inventory of a potential threat. She said nothing, but inclined her head in a single, precise nod. "Asian. She controls weather patterns across a localized area. Lightning included, comparable to Thor in that regard."
Bucky's mechanical arm shifted as he pointed toward the far end of the line, landing on a young man with frameless glasses perched on his nose. The man's posture was relaxed, his weight slightly on one foot, a faint smile already sitting at the corner of his mouth. He looked Nolan and Doom over with the unhurried attention of someone sizing up a puzzle he expected to enjoy.
"Tetsuya Yamashita. Used to be a fisherman, Japanese. He can fabricate functional firearms out of raw metal on the spot, any type he needs. Accuracy near one hundred percent. We call him the Gun God."
Yamashita offered a brief, unhurried smile in return, and said nothing further.
Bucky's gaze moved down the line to a middle-aged white man, somewhat thin, who was doing his quiet best to hold his shoulders back and look taller than he was.
"This one's Bob." Bucky said it flatly, without ceremony. "He was working under me before I left Hydra. Not a true believer, no blood on his hands from operations, he treated it like a salaried position. So I pulled him into this team." He paused briefly. "Lab tests found no detectable superpowers. What he does have is a nearly invisible personal presence, and luck that doesn't have a clean scientific explanation. The kind of luck that doesn't show up in any test, but shows up consistently in the field."
"And the man standing next to Bob..."
"Hey! Big guy, hello!" A voice cut straight across Bucky's sentence, cheerful and entirely unrepentant. The speaker had positioned himself next to Bob with the comfort of someone who had been claiming that spot for some time. "I'm from Canada, you can call me Wade Wilson."
He turned before anyone could respond, directing the next line at Bucky as if continuing a conversation already in progress. "Hey, Bucky, good afternoon. After yesterday..."
He kept going. Bob's home life received a detailed and unsolicited analysis, covering the cultural complexity of his marriage, the sheer volume of children, and what Wade described as the inevitably tragic atmosphere of the household on any given weekday evening. He pivoted from there into a strategic recommendation that the team lacked sufficient manpower, proposed expanding it, and mentioned a cousin named Wilson with explosive combat potential, with a caveat that he wasn't sure which version they would end up finding.
The young man standing directly beside Wade had not spoken once. His expression had remained flat throughout. Now, two blades of solid green energy extended smoothly from the back of his knuckles. He turned, placed the edge of one blade cleanly against Wade Wilson's throat, and held it there.
Wade closed his mouth.
Bucky pressed the palm of his mechanical hand against his forehead and kept it there for a moment.
Then he turned to Nolan, his expression somewhere between apology and exhaustion.
"Wade Wilson. Widely considered the ceiling of the mercenary industry. Goes by Deadpool." He exhaled. "I want to be clear: I did not recruit him. He arrived on his own. He also talked someone at the training facility into handing over a regeneration panacea, used it to fix his face, and then simply refused to leave." A pause. "He told Mariko the Emperor had personally guided him here to offer his loyalty. She believed him."
There was a beat of silence.
At the center of it, the man in question had visibly recovered from the near-decapitation and was now standing at full attention, one arm extended forward in what he appeared to genuinely believe was a proper Hydra salute.
"For the Emperor! For the Primarch Nolan! For the Empire of Man!"
He delivered it with complete sincerity, face arranged in an expression of solemn devotion.
Nolan took a slow breath through his nose.
His hand moved to the Crucible Heart holstered at his waist, fingers closing around the grip. He pulled it clear without hurry, raised it toward Deadpool, and pulled the trigger.
A mass of white-hot plasma erupted from the muzzle and swallowed Deadpool whole. The heat was immediate and absolute. For a fraction of a second there was a human silhouette inside the light, and then there was not. What remained scattered across the metal floor as a thin spread of grey ash.
Nolan lowered the weapon.
"If nothing unexpected happens," he said, his voice even, "I think we can have some quiet for a while."
He looked across the remaining team members without lingering on any of them.
No one disagreed. Even Niwa, who had shown almost no readable response to anything, gave the faintest nod. Even the man with the energy blades, who had yet to offer a name, let his expression settle into something close to approval.
One by one, the group cleared the training ground. The lights stayed on after they left, casting sharp shadows across the metal floor and the fine layer of ash spread across it.
Deep inside that ash, barely visible and far too small to notice, a fragment of flesh no larger than the tip of a needle had already begun to expand.
It was growing steadily, quietly, in no particular hurry.
It would not need long.
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