"Holy shit!"
Because Harry had the call on speaker, everyone in the room could hear it.
They all glanced at one another, each seeing the same confusion in the others' eyes.
There was no doubt about it: the Steve connected to Harry through the Lending contract had to be the real Steve. But if that was true, why did the real Steve sound even crazier than that fake counterpart?
Had the worst-case scenario happened? Even if Steve's original body was still alive, had Hydra still gotten to him and turned him into another Captain Hydra?
After a long silence, Nick Fury said steadily, "Maybe Rogers is being controlled. Harry, keep probing. We need to find out exactly what's happening to him."
Harry nodded and used the connection through the contract to speak directly with Steve.
He tested the line carefully. "Steve? Steve, can you hear me?"
To everyone's relief, Steve seemed to snap back to himself and answered immediately, "Harry, I'm fine... but I won't be for much longer!"
Harry: "???"
So things really were not as simple as they looked. Harry pressed on. "Then what exactly is going on? Were you brainwashed by Hydra? Why do you keep shouting 'Hail Hydra'?"
Even now, Steve was still yelling "Hail Hydra" out loud with a fanatical look on his face, as if he truly had been brainwashed.
But in the private exchange through the contract, his voice remained calm, if a little tired.
"Listen carefully. This is important.
"Two days ago, I was suddenly attacked by another version of myself and locked up in a secret Hydra base.
"For the last two days, Hydra has been trying every possible method to brainwash me and turn me into the new Captain Hydra.
"If I hadn't taken an interest in soul magic and learned a little about it before, enough to resist hypnosis with soul magic, I probably would have lost my own will by now.
"Right now, the only way I can lower Hydra's guard is by acting insane and playing along, so they'll slow down the brainwashing for a while.
"But even so, I can't hold out much longer. Please get me out of here as fast as you can."
Without changing expression, Harry nodded and asked, "Where are you now? Do you know your exact location?"
"Sorry. I don't. They never gave me the chance to learn more.
"There's something else important I have to warn you about.
"There are still a huge number of Hydra agents hiding inside S.H.I.E.L.D. I'd even go so far as to say that more than half of S.H.I.E.L.D. may actually be Hydra agents in disguise!
"At this point, it shouldn't even be called S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore. Hydra-H.I.E.L.D. would be more accurate!
"Oh, and Nick Fury can't be trusted either. He's too smart. There's no way someone like him would just stand there and watch S.H.I.E.L.D. get hollowed out and swallowed whole by Hydra.
"I think Nick Fury himself may be Hydra too!"
The moment those words came out, everyone in the room turned to look at Nick Fury.
And honestly... Steve's logic did make a certain amount of sense.
Nick Fury was a man famous for planning five moves ahead, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., the spider at the center of the web. How could someone that sharp simply allow Hydra agents to gradually replace S.H.I.E.L.D.'s people until the entire organization had effectively become a Hydra branch?
Nick Fury: "..."
His face darkened so much it practically blended into the shadows around him. He defended himself at once.
"If I were really Hydra, would Hydra have attacked me and nearly killed me?
"And if I really had joined them, then what exactly were all my previous operations against Hydra for? Why did I cause them so many losses?"
"Maybe it was all part of the act," Harry suggested helpfully, clearly enjoying himself.
Fury's face got even darker. In a low voice, he said, "You all know perfectly well I'm not Hydra. Right now we should be focusing on Hydra itself, not wasting time dragging up my past mistakes."
Seeing his boss getting piled on, Coulson immediately stepped in with his usual good-guy charm to bail Fury out.
"I'm certain Director Fury is clean. The first thing we need to do now is find the Captain and locate the Hydra base."
Nick Fury gave Coulson the faintest nod. As expected, Coulson really was the most reliable one here. Once he got his position back, he was definitely giving him a promotion and a raise.
Harry rubbed his chin, thought for a moment, then said to the group, "Leave Steve's location to me. I'll find him, bring him back, and take down a military base while I'm at it.
"But everything else is up to you. I'm not interested in politics, and I'm basically clueless when it comes to that sort of thing."
Nick Fury nodded firmly. Having someone that powerful volunteer to take on the hardest part of the mission immediately reduced their pressure by a huge margin.
Harry might also be a walking time bomb, one even more destructive than all the others put together, but Fury had to admit it:
This bomb was incredibly useful.
Once the tasks were assigned, Harry reopened a portal and shot off at full speed in the direction indicated by the Lending contract.
After several rounds of upgrades, Harry's flying cloak had reached a top speed of Mach 3, and under overload it could even hit Mach 10.
That was already beyond the performance specs of the cloak housed at the New York Sanctum, making Harry's the undisputed number-one cloak in Kamar-Taj.
Some time later, after scanning a vast area, Harry finally stopped near the Alps.
Floating a thousand meters above the ground, he looked down with a strange expression.
Below him was the ruined shell of a military base. But beneath the wreckage, Harry could clearly sense a large number of living beings moving around.
What struck him as odd was not the life signs below, but the base itself.
The Alpine Base. Hydra's headquarters during World War II. Most of it had been built inside the mountain itself, and it was there that Red Skull, Johann Schmidt, had once used the Tesseract to develop weapons. Captain America had led an assault on this base and destroyed it.
And yet now, decades later, Hydra had rebuilt the Alpine Base without any government on Earth noticing a thing.
What Harry found even more absurd was that the military base Steve had destroyed in the past had now become the place where Steve himself was imprisoned.
Fate really did have a nasty sense of humor.
Harry made no effort to hide himself. The moment he emerged from the sonic boom cloud, the base below immediately detected him.
Inside the base's main command center, several faces Harry recognized were seated around the room, all of them staring grimly at the satellite feed ahead.
For some reason, the long-vanished Sitwell had taken Pierce's seat at the head of the table. His expression was dark, and black slime was seeping from his body from time to time. He had clearly gained symbiote powers as well.
Sitwell rapped his knuckles hard against the table. The red glow of the Hydra insignia cast warped shadows across his glasses as he swept his gaze over the others.
"That Harry, with all that multiversal power at his command, has become a major threat to us.
"S.H.I.E.L.D.'s records show that he can tear open space with his bare hands and commands a floating city that functions like a full-scale war fortress.
"So tell me—what cards do we still have left? How exactly are we supposed to beat him?"
The conference room fell into dead silence, broken only by the teeth-grinding scrape of metal coming from the ventilation shafts.
Ever since Sitwell had somehow summoned powerful Hydra forces from other worlds, gained the power of those vile symbiotes, and brutally killed Pierce, his temper had only grown worse.
In the last few days alone, he had personally swallowed several agents' heads whole. Even Hydra's own elite operatives were terrified by his cruelty.
One of the scientists swallowed hard and offered his idea.
"It seems Hydra headquarters in the multiverse can mass-produce advanced weapons infused with the power of the Space Stone. If we can keep bombarding Potter with Space Stone energy, maybe we can wound him?"
"Just wound him?" Sitwell roared. "I want him dead!"
Another scientist carefully reminded him, "Sir, Potter has fully come into his own by now. Even Hydra headquarters is extremely wary of him. If we can injure him at all, that would already be a tremendous achievement!"
The moment that scientist finished speaking, a tentacle suddenly shot out of Sitwell's body and swallowed the scientist's head in one bite.
Sitwell licked up the blood and white slime around his mouth, his face twisted with savagery.
"I don't care. You will come up with a plan.
"That plan must have at least a chance of killing Potter, and it absolutely must keep him trapped for more than a day.
"Only then, without the Sorcerer Supreme interfering, will we have a chance to drag this planet into another parallel universe.
"And once that happens, even if Potter comes back afterward, he won't be able to do a damn thing to us!
"You can use whatever resources you need. But if you fail to find a solution, you'll end up just like that man."
The other scientists turned pale and immediately began thinking frantically. Sure enough, people became astonishingly creative when their lives were on the line.
Very quickly, one of them spoke up.
"Sir, our quantum disruptor does interfere with his magic system to some extent, though not by much.
"But if we combine it with the Tesseract fragments left behind by Red Skull, we may be able to create a spatial anchor and forcibly drag him into another parallel universe.
"According to intelligence sent from Hydra headquarters, there is a so-called Sacred Timeline somewhere in the multiverse.
"If that parallel universe lies on the Sacred Timeline, then the moment Harry Potter intrudes, the TVA will definitely attack him.
"And according to all the data we have, we've never found any evidence that Harry Potter can travel freely between parallel universes. So there's a very good chance we can stall him for at least a full day, maybe even longer.
"If we're lucky, the TVA might even kill Harry Potter for us!"
Sitwell's eyes lit up at once.
A multiversal organization confronting Harry Potter head-on... yes, that really might have a chance of killing him.
Without the slightest hesitation, he approved the plan.
"Build the spatial anchor immediately. We're running out of time!"
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