POV Rio
"Wait, no!"
Bang
Ulysses Klaue falls to the ground dead with a massive hole in his skull. Tracking him down was a real pain in the rear, even with the compass, but it was needed, seeing as I got word that he was attempting to sell the Vibranium to Hydra, which I wasn't about to let happen. Especially not now.
We were on the verge of a massive global operation to strike all of Hydra's facilities and hopefully wipe them out all at once. Despite what Hydra's motto might suggest, they are in fact not magical Hydras. They are still humans and thus can be killed. Even if they can't just keep replicating without resources or bases. And for once, it seems the Xenomorphs helped us out quite a lot in that manner, as Hydra lost a lot of bases to Xenomorph infestations if my current estimates are correct.
They still had an estimated 127 operational bases worldwide, but some of those won't even be attacked by us, as they are in the middle of nowhere, and I have an Orbital Space Laser. Studies show that having a ladder in your house is more deadly than an orbital space laser, which is why I own several orbital space lasers, in case some maniac tries to sneak a ladder into my house. Just as the founding fathers intended.
But back to Hydra. They were weakened right now as they can't just instantly recruit more people into their super-secret organization. Especially not when there are a lot of people hiring people for criminal enterprises right now. Then, even when Hydra does hire some people, they have to brainwash them, which takes a while, then you have to train them into shape, and deal with family ties, and it's a whole mess. The point is that it takes a lot of time and energy to train Hydra operatives. And we're going to take advantage of that weakness to hit them really hard over and over again until they are so weak we can wipe them all out.
To accomplish this, we've gathered a truly impressive group. The X-Men, Shield, Guardians of the Globe, Selene's agents, John Wick, the Continental Hotel, Cybertronians, and even the US Government, though they aren't fully in the loop due to internal Hydra infiltration, but enough are in the loop that when we strike, they will strike at the same time. With all these forces together, it was going to be very hard for Hydra to respond effectively.
Now, despite all those preparations, things were still a little risky. Hydra had infiltrated basically every facet of the world. Ripping them out will cause a decent amount of harm and destruction, which is by design, and as much as I may not love that, I can see that letting Hydra survive or rebuild would be the worse option of the two.
I also may have made things a bit harder by accident. When I stole the Tesseract, which made Shield look bad again, it has put Fury under so much pressure that it seems highly likely he will have to resign. That, or some additional budget cuts were going to come down. The only saving grace in this case was that Shield wasn't the sole owner of the Tesseract, in this case, as it was a joint venture. But if I'm being honest, the likelihood of Shield being able to exist after Hydra is eradicated is slim. And even if they do stay, they will be drastically diminished in power, resources, influence, and basically any other category.
But back to the current plan to eradicate Hydra. The fact is, there are too many locations for us to strike in a short amount of time; as such, we have taken a less ideal method of targeting them. The first phase has been done by me. I had gone to every base I could find and set up a magical barrier. It was similar to the one I used against the Triad, but unlike the Triad, I was well aware that Hydra could manage to breach the barrier depending on the base.
Some bases would be wiped out by orbital bombardment, and others would deal with Nova 7. The bases that have hostages or prisoners would be handled by our teams. Those that are in population centers or where Nova 7 isn't viable would be invaded by a combination of Golems and Iron Man Drones. That still left around 11 bases that we can't cover and have hostages. For those, a barrier would have to stall them long enough until hopefully we could strike them once we finish with our other assignments. The reason I wasn't sending in Golems or Iron Man Drones was that Iron Man Drones are too few in number and already stretched very thin. Golems, on the other hand, are too unintelligent for the job; they would likely cause the hostages and prisoners to be killed.
My best solution for this matter was to have some assassins from the Continental Hotels do the work, but they would be busy targeting Hydra operatives across the globe. We were spending tens of billions of dollars on the contracts, but with the cash prizes, it was likely that most of the spies would be found and eradicated.
Now, you might wonder how we found all those spies, and the answer is very simple. Hydra is no better at keeping me out of their networks than Shield. I did exactly the same thing I did to Shield, though in Hydra's case, I had to work a bit harder as Zola was a tricky fellow to work around.
Speaking of Zola, he had already dealt with. The man was an impressive AI, but he wasn't good enough. To get rid of him, all you have to do is remove his wired connections to the rest of the network and then jam all signals from leaving his main body. Then I activate a massive DDOS attack, combined with releasing several viruses into his programming. While he was busy fighting off those attacks, I was working to isolate his core programming before I cut off the connection. The issue with AI is that if you remove a key component of the code, the entire system shuts down. From there, it was easy to remove Zola, get a complete list of all Hydra operatives, create a puppet Zola that would pretend everything was fine, and lastly make it so Zola could keep us in the loop on the surviving Hydra members, as they would never think he could be compromised.
I wasn't fully sure this would work, as it was possible some would manage to catch on and slip the net, but this strategy should capture the vast majority of Hydra; whoever remains shouldn't be too hard to track down and kill. Now, there was a legitimate claim that killing all these brainwashed people was morally wrong, but honestly, there is truly no better way. The level of brainwashing was deep, and we just don't have the resources to contain all those Hydra members, prevent them from killing themselves, or report what was happening, or escaping, and then slowly break through the brainwashing. I could break them eventually, but even I knew it would likely take days per person, and even then, it's very possible it still wouldn't be perfect. Not to mention those who wouldn't be able to handle knowing what they did.
It just wasn't feasible. Especially when you consider that not everyone was brainwashed, some were truly Hydra through and through, and even Hydra didn't keep the best record of who was truly brainwashed or indoctrinated. Thus, some losses were required to ensure the world could be rid of Hydra once and for all.
But in slightly less depressing news, I finished assimilating Nahdar Vebb. And I had to admit that what I got in exchange was more than worth it. I got a Unicorn template. Now, the first issue was figuring out what version of unicorn I got, as there are a lot of different versions in fiction.
It took a little bit of time to figure out what version I got, and even then, I wasn't fully sure where it came from. The abilities I could understand were as follows. Nature Preservation and, to some extent, magic preservation, which is similar to what the Elven Rings of Power did in The Lord of the Rings. I could live forever if I couldn't do that already. I can heal others and purge all toxins from others. Once I fully assimilate, I can even bring the recently deceased back to life, though it seems this is a limited-use ability as I can only do so once a year or so, depending on the circumstances. Another useful ability I got was that I no longer had to hide my ears, as nobody can perceive anything supernatural about me unless they truly believe. Related to this, I exude an aura of truth. Others will find it nearly impossible to lie to me.
The best ability in my mind was the perception I got. I can now see the darkness within one's heart. The darker the heart, the worse the person is. It worked similarly to the Ghost Riders' Sin Perception. I considered it the most useful, as now I no longer had to borrow Ghost Riders' abilities to determine someone's guilt. On the other hand, the least useful ability I got was an aura of purity. When I release it completely, those who are near me that are evil aligned will suffer a weakening effect, nothing very strong, but it was something. Those that are grey or good-aligned will instead be awed by the purity of the aura I give off, and it may bring them to tears. The worst part is that the aura is always on; I can only suppress it by 99% or so unless I am transformed into a template. Some people are sensitive to this aura and will be attracted to it for both good and ill.
The only other noteworthy ability was an increase in my magic power, which was by a pretty noticeable amount, which was good, as I really didn't like how low my current reserves were. I suppose it was also now an even stronger ally of nature and those that live within it, but that was hardly noticeable.
But that aside, I had to get back to work as these golems wouldn't build themselves. I know cause I tried. At least they didn't cost that much to make and were easy enough to store, and I now had more mana to work with. They weren't technically living things, and as such, I can place them in my inventory.