Chapter 135: The Company Is Under Attack!
After SHIELD released Thor, the insufferable arrogance he'd carried into New Mexico receded by degrees over the following days.
Humility and genuine effort became his new register. It was a noticeable change.
Peaceful days moved past. Matthew, with nothing urgent requiring his attention, was happy to take the slower pace, spending time eating and drinking with Thor and the others around whatever was on the table.
Until a call broke through it, and pulled him out entirely.
That evening.
Matthew was in the middle of a hot pot meal with Erik, Thor, and whoever else had ended up at the table, conversation running easily, when his phone went off with an urgency that cut through the room.
"Excuse me." He pulled the phone from his pocket, gave the group a brief smile of apology, walked inside, and closed the door firmly behind him.
He looked at the screen.
[Eleanor]
He frowned slightly. At this hour?
He answered immediately. "Eleanor. Calling this late, what's happened?"
Her voice came back through the line with a weight in it that she was doing her best to control: "Sir. The company. We've been attacked."
Two seconds of silence. Matthew didn't ask for any clarification. He said six words and ended the call: "Wait for me to come back."
He didn't tell the others. There was no time for that. The gravity around him snapped and inverted in an instant.
The group outside heard a dull concussive sound and in the time it took to turn their heads, there was nothing there. Matthew was gone.
Gravity manipulation at full output launched him from a standing start to four times the speed of sound.
Eighty tons per square meter of gravitational force. Even for Matthew, a few seconds of adjustment were necessary before the flight fully settled.
At this speed, he matched or exceeded Tony's Mark VI. New Mexico to New York in thirty minutes.
The onrushing air pressure was sharp enough to cut. The blood mist rising around him condensed in seconds into spindle-shaped armor over his body, a streamlined form that fit the airflow far better than a human silhouette, buying him additional speed on top of what the gravity was already giving him.
About twenty minutes later, he halted in the air above the Umbrella building.
He looked down.
The glass exterior was shattered across multiple sections. Walls were peeling in others, whole sections balanced on the edge of coming loose. The only thing holding some of it together was Spider-Man's webbing, which had been deployed in thick cables across the worst of it. Without that, the debris would have been in the street long since.
Below: more than a dozen police cars and ambulances in loose formation along the road. Injured security staff and civilians at intervals across the scene. The air carried the sharp, chemical smell of gunpowder and smoke.
Whatever had come through here, it had been recent and it had been substantial.
He dissolved into blood mist and reconsolidated inside his office.
Ada and Eleanor were on the sofa. When they saw him, both of them visibly let something go that they'd been holding.
"Sir."
"Boss." They rose together.
Matthew raised a hand, stopping the greeting before it formed. "One of you. Tell me what happened here tonight."
They looked at each other.
Eleanor spoke first. "I'll summarize."
"Based on our initial assessment, the cause isn't complicated."
"It was the V-Virus project."
"The V-Virus?" His brow pulled together.
"Yes." Eleanor kept her voice level. "As you know, the V-Virus research requires a constant supply of test subjects, and the test subjects aren't human. They're vampires. Cloning can't replace them. Every time a batch of subjects is exhausted, the company runs a sweep of pre-scouted vampire locations to maintain the supply."
She paused.
"Until tonight. Somehow that group of vampires obtained this information, and launched a large-scale retaliatory strike under cover of dark."
Her expression had settled into something flatter than usual. The attack had embarrassed her, and she knew it.
"Preliminary numbers: forty-three civilian staff injured, fifteen killed. Six security staff injured, one killed. Direct economic losses already over a million."
Ada stepped in when Eleanor paused. "The attack was organized. Disciplined formation, significant conventional firepower. This wasn't improvised. It was a targeted operation."
"I think tonight was a probe. If we don't locate and eliminate this group entirely, they'll treat us like a standing target and keep coming."
Before Matthew could respond, the desk phone rang.
He looked at the number.
Surveillance department.
"What is it?" He picked up and kept his voice low.
"Boss." The voice on the other end had urgency running through it. "The Nursery is under armed attack. Origin unknown."
Fuck.
He slammed the phone down.
Two quick instructions to Eleanor and Ada on handling the aftermath, compensate the casualties and their families generously, then his form dissolved into blood mist and he was gone.
Inside the Nursery, gunfire had torn through the night.
Children's voices, frightened and sharp, filled every corridor.
The T-Virus-enhanced security team had sealed the facility. Heavy steel shutters had come down across every entrance and window, locking the attackers outside. The team wasn't afraid of this group. Their mandate tonight was the children, not the fight.
The vampires on the outside stared at the sealed building with a focused, grinding fury. Their submachine guns hammered continuously at the doors and walls. Grenades came in at intervals.
If not for the fangs at the corners of their mouths, someone walking past would have taken them for terrorists.
"You!" The leader's eyes were on the elderly woman his subordinate was holding by the hair, her feet barely touching the ground. His voice was flat and cold. "You're this facility's director. Order them to open the doors."
"Surely you don't want what's in our guns to end up inside your skull."
The director Matthew had hired was a woman of decades of experience: management, education, character that was hard to find. Someone genuinely valuable. Someone who had chosen this work because she believed in it.
And she was being held this way.
If Matthew had been there to see it, there wouldn't have been enough of these vampires left to identify.
Fear was visible on the director's face. She didn't try to hide it. But beneath the fear was something that didn't move at all.
"Is that a threat?"
"Then I suggest you reconsider. I will not sacrifice more lives to save one of mine. That is not something that will happen."
"If you have what it takes, then go ahead."
"And then we'll see what my employer does about it afterward."
The eyes behind her gold-rimmed glasses had gone cold in a specific way. The look she turned on them didn't contain any uncertainty about how this ended for them.