# Chapter 7
The next fourteen days blurred into one long marathon that smelled of gunpowder, strong coffee, and rain. Belgrade turned out to be a city that paid generously for other people's dirty secrets, and the Spotter kept me steadily supplied with targets.
I completed four more contracts for him. And with each one, the assignments grew more complex and the targets more dangerous.
The owner of an underground casino who had decided to cheat an Albanian syndicate. I reached him on the top floor of a guarded penthouse. That night, Altaïr's Parkour earned every bit of its worth — the security was waiting for an assault up the stairwells and elevators, so I simply climbed the sheer glass face of the high-rise, hooking my fingers into the microscopic gaps between the panels.
An arms dealer gone to ground in the port. When my salvaged pistol jammed, a heavy steel wrench went to work instead. The muscle memory activated flawlessly — the throw landed with a sniper's precision, and the target went down with a caved chest.
A cleanup operation at a local cartel's laboratory. I tested the Dark Knight suit again there. Kalashnikov rounds that hit me in the chest from the darkness left nothing more than bruises beneath the tri-titanium fiber. And the thermal visor let me finish the job in thick smoke in a couple of minutes.
The serum-rebuilt body worked like clockwork. While ordinary mercenaries needed days to recover from broken bones and gunshot wounds, everything on me healed in hours. I barely slept, but my mind stayed crystal clear and my reflexes stayed off the charts.
I had proven my effectiveness. And the Spotter had taken note. Our communication grew more frequent and less formal.
The next call came while I was sitting in an unremarkable café on the edge of the city, nursing an espresso. I'd grown accustomed to the synthetic rasp of the vocoder, so the sound that came from the speaker this time stopped me cold.
"Good morning. I heard things got loud at the port yesterday."
The voice was a woman's. Low, with the faint roughness of a smoker, calm and surprisingly alive. No metallic distortion whatsoever. My linguistic matrices picked up the detail instantly — beneath her Serbian there was a barely perceptible accent, the kind that settled into a person after years of living somewhere in Western Europe.
I took a sip of coffee without betraying any surprise.
"Did the vocoder break?" I asked evenly.
"I turned it off," she answered. A lighter clicked in the background, followed by the sound of an inhale. "In our business, trust is a luxury. But you don't ask unnecessary questions, you work clean, you don't haggle over every coin, and — most importantly — you haven't once tried to find out who I am. Consider this a gesture of appreciation. You can call me Anya."
Her candor was a welcome bonus, but I was more interested in practical matters.
"Glad to meet you, Anya. Since we've moved to a new level of trust, it's time to talk business. I've done enough dirty work to prove my qualifications. Now I need clean documents."
A pause on the line. I heard only street noise on her end.
"You mean your ticket to the States," she said at last. "I remember."
"That's right. I don't need a cheap tourist forgery. I need a bulletproof passport with a history. A biography, tax records, a driver's license. A package that won't crack under customs or the CIA."
"You're asking for the impossible…" Anya let out a heavy breath. "There is one man. A genuine artist. We call him Da Vinci. Don't ask why — just accept it. He can build you an identity out of thin air. It will be so real that you'll believe yourself you were born in Ohio and played baseball in college."
"That sounds like exactly what I need."
"Don't get excited yet. Da Vinci doesn't charge just a lot for his masterpieces. He charges astronomically. What you've earned over these two weeks wouldn't even cover the deposit."
I leaned back in my chair and watched the rain streak down the window.
"So I need a bigger contract," I said flatly. "Something that pays millions, not thousands."
"I knew you'd say that." A trace of a smile slipped into her voice. "This very morning, some serious people reached out to me. The job… let's say it's not for the faint-hearted. It's a ticket to the major leagues, but if you make one mistake, your little suit with the ears won't save you."
She'd found out about my Batman suit — though honestly, I hadn't been hiding it.
I drained the last of my cooling coffee and set the cup carefully on its saucer. The math of survival was already assembling itself in my head: the risk was high, but the reward wasn't just money. It was freedom. The final destination in the country I needed to reach.
"If this Da Vinci can actually work miracles and turn me into a US citizen with an airtight history, then the price is just a number on paper," I said, studying my own reflection in the café window. "I'm in, Anya. Tell me who needs to be removed, or what needs to be retrieved, so we can close this chapter once and for all."
The lighter clicked again on her end. She was clearly more nervous than she wanted to let on.
"Good attitude. You're going to need every drop of that confidence." Her voice turned businesslike. "Listen carefully. The client is an international consortium that's very unhappy with the activities of a certain 'scientific philanthropist' here in Eastern Europe. Officially, he builds data centers. Unofficially, he's developing cyber-surveillance systems capable of cracking any encrypted channel."
I frowned slightly. Cyber-technology wasn't exactly my field — but storming fortified installations was something I'd become a master at, courtesy of the serum and the suit.
"Your task isn't simply to get in and get out," Anya continued. "The facility is in an old Soviet bunker that's been converted into a server station. The security is former special forces, equipped with state-of-the-art hardware. You need to penetrate the lower level, retrieve a physical storage device containing the prototype core, and… completely destroy the infrastructure."
"Sounds like a one-way trip for an ordinary person," I noted, feeling the familiar excitement stir inside me. The serum-enhanced muscles tensed involuntarily. "But I'm not an ordinary person."
"Exactly why I'm calling you. The payment for this contract will cover Da Vinci's services in full, and you'll still have enough left for a decent house somewhere in the Chicago suburbs."
I stood from the table and dropped a few bills on it.
"Where do I pick up the detailed blueprints and guard rotation schedules?" I asked, already stepping out into the rain-soaked street.
"At the docks this evening, hangar four. There'll be a case. But this time I'm coming in person. It's time to meet face-to-face before you walk into this inferno."
"I'll be there," I said, and ended the call.
---
The rain drummed against my jacket, but I barely felt it. The hardest stage was ahead. If that bunker was guarded by professionals, I was going to need everything — visor, skills, all of it. Every handle, every chunk of concrete in that bunker would have to become an ally.
My road to America had just been painted in bloodred, but I'd long since grown used to walking these kinds of paths.
---
By evening, the fog off the Sava rolled across the old docks like thick milk. I walked toward hangar four, aware of a faint vibration in my chest. It wasn't my heartbeat — the serum-enhanced pulse always ran steady. This was the Singularity energy pulsing.
The internal timer informed me that exactly one month had passed since my last summon in the cave. The reservoir was full. I had a choice: burn it on ten quick spins into the unknown, or pour everything into a single guaranteed high-powered pull. I decided to hold that card. If the mission went south, I might need a miracle.
Inside the hangar, the same dim bulb burned. But this time, there was a woman standing by the barrel.
She wore a dark leather coat and combat boots. Short ash-gray hair, sharp gray eyes, and a thin scar crossing her left eyebrow. She was smoking a slender cigarette and studying me carefully through the pale blue haze.
"Anya," she said, dropping the butt on the concrete and grinding it out under her boot.
"Good to finally see you," I answered, stopping a couple of steps away.
She smirked and patted an armored attaché case resting on the metal surface.
"Everything you need is in here. Blueprints, patrol maps, access codes for the outer gates. And an advance for consumables. But there's a detail I didn't want to mention on the phone."
Anya opened the case and produced a printed photograph. On the white page was a logo I knew in my bones — a stylized skull with tentacles, set inside a hexagon.
I stared at that symbol, and for a moment the raw smell of the docks was replaced by the sharp bite of formaldehyde and antiseptic. The phantom cold of the oxygen-saturated liquid I had drowned in at Strucker's lab locked around my chest. In my ears came the screams of the experimented-on and the crunch of Nada's joints breaking on the operating table. And behind it all came the rage. Cold, incinerating every other feeling in its path. My fingers curled into fists so tight my knuckles cracked.
"This isn't just some street gang," Anya said quietly, misreading my taut silence. "This is a branch of an organization that calls itself Hydra. True believers. Their technology is decades ahead of ours. Energy weapons, exoskeletons, genetic modification. The client wants you to level their data center."
I took the photograph from her hands. Hydra. They thought I'd run and gone to ground somewhere. Strucker had promised to be more careful next time and called me an "expensive toy." Well. I'd learned my lesson too.
In the place where fear might have been, a bloodthirsty eagerness was building to a boil. To clear out another rat's nest belonging to the bastards who'd turned me into a lab animal — and to get paid for it in the process, with the proceeds going straight to Da Vinci for a perfect set of documents? I couldn't have dreamed of a better gift from fate.
"I'll take it." My voice came out level, but there was iron in it. "And trust me, Anya — I know exactly what they're capable of. But they have no idea who's coming for them. Give me until morning. I need to prep my gear."
Anya nodded slowly, and in her eyes I read surprise mixed with something that looked like genuine respect for my absolute, ice-cold certainty.
"Good luck. If you make it out alive, Da Vinci will make you an American faster than you can say 'cheese.'"
I turned and walked away into the fog. The plan was already forming in my head. I had the Dark Knight suit, the skills of the finest killers across the multiverse, hatred simmering in my veins, and a full reservoir of Singularity energy waiting for its moment. Hydra had signed its own sentence.
---
The old Soviet bunker sat in dense forest several dozen kilometers outside Belgrade. From the outside it looked like an abandoned weather station, ringed by rusty chain-link fencing. But the Dark Knight helmet's multi-mode visor showed an entirely different picture.
I sat on a thick branch of an old oak, merging with the night, and scanned the perimeter. Beneath the illusion of abandonment was a genuine anthill. The thermal imaging picked up powerful generators buried underground, ventilation shafts radiating heat from working servers, and a dense web of patrols. The guards moved intelligently, covering overlapping sectors. They carried no ordinary rifles — the barrels were unusually heavy, the same energy weapons Anya had warned me about.
A frontal assault was out of the question. Energy discharges could burn through even my suit's tri-titanium fiber if I walked into a crossfire. I needed to be more precise.
Studying the camera and patrol movement patterns, I spotted the weak point — the sheer concrete wall of a blind ventilation tower. For an ordinary person, climbing it was impossible, which was exactly why the cameras weren't watching it. For me, with Altaïr's skills, it was nothing.
I waited for the patrol to disappear around a corner, then glided silently from the tree on the rigid cape and landed at the base of the tower. My fingers found the microscopic imperfections in the concrete as if by instinct. I scaled the wall with a spider's ease, without producing a single sound. At the top, I used the ceramic knife to carefully shear the old bolts from the grille and slipped into the dark shaft.
Inside the bunker smelled of heated metal and sterility. I moved through the maintenance levels directly above the guards' heads. When two patrolmen blocked my path at a sealed door, raw physical force was the answer. I wrenched a heavy steel valve from the wall, dropped behind them, and with two lightning-fast, precise strikes to the base of the neck sent both into deep unconsciousness. Quiet, efficient, not a single shot fired.
Descending to the lowest level, I entered an enormous data center hall. Rows of black server monoliths hummed and blinked with thousands of LED indicators. At the very center, behind armored glass, sat the terminal housing the physical storage device — the prototype core.
I cracked the server room lock with the decoder Anya had provided. The armored glass slid aside. The prototype was a smooth cylinder of dark metal. I pulled it from its slot and tucked it into the pouch on my suit's belt. First part of the contract: complete.
All that remained was the hardest part — destroying the infrastructure. I pulled the C-4 charges Anya had supplied from my pack and began attaching them to the primary cooling circuits of the servers.
I was fixing the last charge when the light in the hall abruptly shifted to a pulsing emergency red. No siren — only a cold, mechanical voice from the speakers:
*"Attention. Unauthorized core extraction detected. Isolation protocol activated."*
Massive sealed doors on every exit from the hall slammed down with a crash, cutting off my retreat completely. At the same moment, six operatives stepped out from concealed alcoves in the walls. This was not standard security. They wore bulky Hydra exoskeletons, and they carried heavy plasma emitters.
They didn't bother asking questions or offering a chance to surrender. The air in the hall superheated instantly as crossfiring bolts of bluish plasma cut through the room. I barely managed a roll behind the main server rack. The plasma hissed and melted the metal where I'd been standing a second before.
I was boxed in. The rounds from my silenced pistols wouldn't scratch their armor, and they wouldn't let me close for hand-to-hand — they'd cut me down on the approach. The explosives were set, but I couldn't trigger the timer while I was still inside this hall.
The situation was critical. The serum and the Batman armor gave me a chance at survival, but survival wasn't enough for what came next. The time had come.
I closed my eyes, tuning out the thunder of plasma discharges melting my cover, and focused on the heavy, pulsing heat in my solar plexus.
**[ SINGULARITY ENERGY: 100% ]**
I reached toward the interface in my mind, ready to make my choice…
---
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