Chapter 156: Operation: Destroy the Avengers
Nick Fury's Avengers Initiative was moving fast.
After Soldier Boy signed on, Fury tracked down Steve Rogers, who was currently in the middle of a date with Captain Carter, Peggy Carter specifically.
Since Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter had been pulled out of the ice in quick succession, the two of them had settled into a life of their own making, and by all available evidence they were happy. Seventy years had vanished between then and now, and they had landed in a world they barely recognized, but with each other present, none of that seemed to matter much.
Fury's arrival interrupted the date.
Compared to Soldier Boy and his ever-ready verbal arsenal, these two were considerably more composed. No racial commentary, no pointed remarks. What came through instead was something that belonged entirely to their era: a straightforward, uncomplicated sense of duty.
Call it whatever you want. If there's a fight, they show up.
Captain America was always going to be Captain America. Carter was always going to be Carter.
A short conversation later, both of them had agreed to join the Avengers without any real hesitation.
That brought the Initiative's total of thawed-out veterans to three.
Fury also reached out to Matthew.
The street battle had made Matthew's capability level fairly clear. Wherever you set the ceiling in terms of threat response, Matthew belonged at the top end of it.
Unlike the straightforward conversation with Steve and Peggy, Matthew's answer to Fury was the same one he always gave: pay him and he'd work, but he wasn't going to put in time for free, regardless of how the ask was framed, even if the framing involved phrases like "protecting world peace."
Fury didn't push back on this.
From where he was sitting, the pay-for-services arrangement was transactional and had no warmth to it, but it was efficient. If the money was right, the job got done. Simple enough.
And money happened to be the one resource he was least short on right now.
He had, after all, accumulated quite a bit of it over the years through various channels. (Redacted.)
In the weeks that followed, Fury made his rounds. He met with Tony Stark. He met with Dr. Banner. He ran down Spider-Man's real identity through means he didn't document, and arranged a direct meeting with Peter Parker.
Tony's answer was less transactional than Matthew's. He was open to the Avengers, but his involvement would be as a consultant, on his own terms, present when he chose to be.
Dr. Banner required more personal effort from Fury to bring around.
Peter Parker, by contrast, heard the words "protecting world peace" and committed on the spot without any meaningful deliberation.
His reasoning was more or less what you'd expect. The late Uncle Ben had something to say on the subject: with great power comes great responsibility.
And with that, a non-standard version of the founding Avengers was complete.
Compared to the original lineup, this one came with two extra veterans who'd been on ice since the forties, one Spider-Man, and one unnamed individual who required payment but would otherwise show up and do the work.
With the Seven's marketing campaign running at full volume everywhere you looked, Fury made the Avengers public: loudly, deliberately, and without apology.
Why the high-profile announcement?
The reasoning was straightforward, as far as Fury and SHIELD were concerned.
National and global security couldn't be handed over entirely to a corporate superhero franchise. And the public couldn't be allowed to know only Vought's Seven while SHIELD and the Avengers remained invisible.
Put it simply: they operated in a capitalist country, but some things still needed to be done for the public rather than for the bottom line.
Inside the Vought building.
Homelander sat in his chair at the head of the conference room table, holding the Avengers' promotional poster that had apparently materialized out of nowhere. The expression on his face was dark enough that you could have wrung it out.
His gaze moved slowly around the room, settling on one team member after another. The weight behind it was the kind that pressed down on people. One by one, every person in the room found something to look at that wasn't him.
In the silence that followed, Homelander spoke first.
"I've seen the Avengers' promotional poster."
"Honestly? Their poster is about seventy percent identical to ours."
"Even the headcount. Seven members. What a coincidence."
"So. Can anyone explain to me whether this Avengers Initiative is our competition or not?"
Nobody responded.
He took a slow breath, turned his chair, and looked at A-Train beside him. "A-Train. You tell me."
"Don't worry. Say the wrong thing and nothing's going to happen to you."
That line landed about as convincingly as a king telling a courtier to speak freely. In theory, a generous offer. In practice, this was Homelander making it, which meant the guarantee had approximately zero credibility, and everyone in the room knew it.
A-Train, now the center of attention he hadn't asked for, went rigid.
"Uh... that is..." He opened his mouth several times. Nothing came out. A cold sweat had arrived along his spine.
No answer was forthcoming, but the fear in A-Train's face was apparently satisfying enough. Homelander's attention moved on. "All right. Never mind."
"Black No- yeah, skipping you."
His gaze passed over Black Noir without comment and landed on The Deep.
The Deep, if anything, was more frightened than A-Train had been. He managed several false starts and produced nothing useful.
"The Deep. That was my mistake. I shouldn't have expected anything from you."
He turned to Translucent. "Translucent. You have something?"
Homelander had expected Translucent to stammer through this the same way the others had. He was wrong. Translucent actually had information.
"Sir. The Avengers Initiative is a program organized by a government agency called SHIELD."
"Their mandate covers special incidents and events that fall outside standard law enforcement capability."
"Technically they're a government body, which means they're not in competition with us in any direct sense. The timing is just... unfortunate. SHIELD went public with the Avengers not long after we launched."
"And their roster includes Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man..."
"On top of that, we're the new arrivals. The fresh faces."
"Which means the Avengers, full of established names, already had more brand recognition than us before anyone fired a shot."
"Officially there's no direct competition between the Avengers Initiative and us."
"But there's no way around it: their arrival has undercut our momentum." Translucent's delivery was flat and matter-of-fact.
Vought's revenue model had two main pillars. The first was appearance fees, structured the same way major celebrities got paid to show up at events. The second was direct government contracts for handling serious incidents.
The Avengers operated differently. In the interest of global stability, they moved on threats before anyone had written a check. Terrorist organizations, disaster response, emerging threats: the Avengers just dealt with it, unprompted.
The direct result was a measurable drop in Vought's contract income.
And a drop in Vought's income meant a drop in every individual person in this room's personal income.
There's a saying that cutting off someone's livelihood is worse than killing their parents. As far as this room was concerned right now, the Avengers were the people cutting off the livelihood.
Translucent finished laying out the full picture. Homelander's eyes narrowed slightly.
He was about to speak when the conference room door opened.
Ikorela Joni walked in.
She let her gaze move over the assembled heroes, dropped the documents she was carrying on the table without much ceremony, and spoke with the chill of someone who didn't feel the need to soften anything. "The company has been running a quiet operation for a while now. The goal was to get the Seven formally integrated into the military defense framework."
"That would have expanded our influence and generated significant new revenue streams."
"And if I'm reading the situation correctly..." She paused. "You were supposed to replace this so-called Avengers Initiative entirely."
"But it looks like someone got there before us."
She was wearing her signature pearl-white deep-V formal dress. The irritation in her voice was completely unmasked.
At the conference table, Homelander absorbed the information that they'd come within reach of displacing the Avengers entirely and locking in a position inside the defense establishment. The fist he had resting on the table tightened.
"Ikorela." He looked at her directly. "You didn't come all this way just to tell us bad news."
He knew her well enough. She didn't make personal appearances for the purpose of delivering problems without solutions. If she was here, she'd brought something else with her.
He was right.
The corner of Ikorela's mouth curved into something deliberate. "Correct."
"The company has already issued a new operational directive."
"If the Avengers took our position, we find a way to destroy them."
"Direct conflict is a bad idea." Lamplighter's eyes narrowed.
The Avengers had the government behind them. Going at them head-on was walking into a trap of your own making.
Ikorela laughed, short and dry. "Destroying something doesn't require attacking it from the front."
"You can destroy a country through its culture. Let the rot start at the root and work its way up."
"So what's the approach?" Homelander looked at her.
"Simple." Ikorela addressed the room.
"Find out what they don't want the public to know. Then make it public. Destroy their image."
"I refuse to believe everyone in that group has a spotless record."
"Once the public image is gone, they stop being superheroes in anyone's mind. They become something else."
The reason superheroes held their status with the public came down to one thing: the image. The clean face they showed to the world. Always positive, always reliable, always on the right side.
Once the image broke, there was nothing left. In the public's eyes, someone with powers and a ruined reputation was simply a dangerous person with powers.
For example the incident in Lagos during what would eventually be known as the Civil War conflict. Scarlet Witch, caught in an impossible situation, had made the call to throw Crossbones and his bomb into a building rather than let it detonate at ground level. A triage decision under pressure.
The explosion rewrote public perception of the Avengers overnight.
From that point forward, they were no longer protectors. They were a liability that needed government oversight. Their public standing dropped and didn't recover.
What Ikorela was proposing was an engineered version of that collapse. Force the Avengers to stop looking like the reliable option. Make the Seven look like the only reliable option by comparison.
She turned to Translucent. "If we're looking at which Avengers member has the most damaging material available, it's not close. It's Umbrella."
Tri-Corporation's long history of competing with Umbrella had given Ikorela access to a substantial volume of negative information about the company: rumors, internal reports, the kind of material that circulated within the industry but had never made it to print, never left a paper trail.
"And if we need someone to go in and get it, there's one obvious choice." She looked at Translucent directly.
"Your assignment is straightforward. Infiltrate Umbrella. Find research documentation involving human test subjects. Photographs of the experimental process would be ideal."
"One operation gives us two outcomes: a direct strike against Matthew Lawrence's public standing, and a secondary collapse in Umbrella's stock price."
"Clean upside, no downside." With Translucent's assignment established, she moved her attention to A-Train and the others in sequence, laying out the rest of the plan piece by piece.
The following morning. Outside the Umbrella building.
Translucent stood naked in the middle of the crowd moving along the sidewalk and indulged himself.
Going through a crowd with nothing on was his preferred method of satisfying an exhibitionist streak that he would not have described as a healthy interest. He was also known to slip into women's restrooms while invisible, which covered a separate category of compulsion that was no less troubling than the first.
Today, though, he had a job to do.
He shook off the indulgence and moved. He covered the distance to the building entrance quickly, moving through the foot traffic without any of it registering his presence.
Getting past building security was straightforward. The elevator required an internal access wristband, but all that required was waiting for the lobby reception desk to look the other way and lifting one.
The elevator tone sounded.
The doors slid open on the upper floor.
The receptionist looked up. Empty car.
"...That's strange." She came around the desk, checked both ends of the corridor, confirmed there was nobody there, and went back to her seat.
In the corridor.
Translucent moved along the wall, reading the department plaques on either side.
He found what he was looking for quickly: a placard that read Chairman's Office.
The sensitive files, if they exist anywhere, they're in there.
He pressed himself against the wall and considered his approach.
He started toward the door and stopped.
Something was off.
The entire stretch of corridor leading to the Chairman's Office had no security cameras. Not one.
He'd counted more than twenty cameras on the ground floor alone. Up here, directly outside the office of the most powerful man in the building: nothing.
"That's odd."
He stood outside the door and turned it over.
The answer he settled on was the obvious one. Privacy consideration. The chairman doesn't want his movements recorded.
He shrugged internally and moved it to the back of his mind.
He ran through Ikorela's warning from before he'd left.
Matthew Lawrence is not someone to underestimate. If you can avoid drawing his attention, do that. Don't get close to him if you can help it.
We only need the documentation. That's all.
Translucent studied the heavy wooden door in front of him.
Whether Matthew was on the other side of it right now, he genuinely didn't know.
But it didn't particularly matter. If Matthew was inside, Translucent would wait him out, quiet and invisible, until he left. Then he'd have the office to himself.
He was still working through the approach when the door moved.
A tuxedo cat appeared in the gap, having hooked the handle open with its paw, and strolled out into the corridor with the unhurried confidence of an animal that owned the space it was moving through.
Translucent's eyes lit up.
A slow grin spread across his face.
His lucky day.
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