The assault began at 0300 hours.
Hydra Base designation was provisional—an underground complex carved into black stone, layered with false walls, kill corridors, and retreat shafts. Commander Cody led from the front, his presence alone sharpening the Red Right Hand into something lethal and precise. Orders were short. Movements were clean. No hesitation.
Foundation breaching charges turned the outer blast doors into molten slag.
Hydra responded instantly.
Automatic fire ripped through the access halls, red tracer lines slashing through smoke as Foundation operatives rolled, advanced, and returned fire with disciplined bursts. Laser rifles burned through cover. Conventional rounds followed, shattering concrete and bodies alike. Hydra troopers fought hard—fanatical, desperate—but they were outmatched.
Cody moved like a machine built for war.
A Hydra soldier lunged from a side corridor—Cody caught him mid-charge, crushed his wrist, disarmed him, and put him down with a single shot without breaking stride. Another tried to retreat, only to be tackled by two Red Right Hand operatives, restrained, sedated, and dragged back for extraction.
Within twenty minutes, the base was secured.
And the Red Skull was gone.
"Negative on primary target," Cody reported calmly, standing amid the wreckage of Hydra's command center. "Schmidt evacuated before our arrival. Likely via sub-level transit tunnel."
There was no anger in his voice. Just fact.
What was here, however, was valuable.
Foundation teams swept the facility room by room, tagging and securing anomalous objects—unregistered relics, prototype weapons, half-finished devices that warped sensors just by proximity. Several were immediately classified as provisional anomalies, wrapped in containment fields and loaded onto transports.
Hydra personnel—scientists, officers, handlers—were taken alive.
At least, that was the intention.
Interrogation began within the hour.
One by one, the prisoners were isolated. Questioned. Pressured. Offered protection, amnesty, even false hope.
None spoke.
The first subject smiled as the questions started.
Then bit down.
The cyanide capsule shattered between his teeth before the guards could react. He convulsed, eyes rolling back, foam forming at his lips. Dead in seconds.
The second tore free of his restraints and smashed his own skull against the interrogation table hard enough to fracture bone.
The third used a concealed shard of glass embedded beneath his fingernail.
It didn't stop.
Medical scans confirmed it quickly—deep psychological conditioning layered with chemical triggers and neural fail-safes. Hydra had gone beyond loyalty. They had rewritten survival instinct itself.
"They'd rather die than betray Hydra," one interrogator said quietly, staring at the body on the floor.
"No," Cody corrected, watching from the observation deck. "They were taught to."
By the end of the cycle, every captured Hydra operative was dead—by their own hand.
The Foundation gained objects, technology, data fragments.
But no answers.
Cleanup teams moved in. Bodies were catalogued. Anomalies secured. The base was sterilized and collapsed, erased from the map like it had never existed.
As the Red Right Hand extracted, Cody paused at the entrance tunnel, looking back at the darkened facility.
Hydra was learning.
Not just how to fight—but how to deny the Foundation what it needed most.
Information.
And somewhere out there, the Red Skull was watching the pattern unfold… already planning the next move.