You moved through the city under the cover of darkness, the burnt scent of HYDRA's failed facility still clinging to your clothes. Raze kept pace beside you, ducking in and out of alleyways like a trained predator. His stride was loud, careless, and full of chaotic energy, but his instincts were sharp.
He didn't ask where you were going.
He didn't need to.
You led him to an old maintenance bunker two levels beneath the East River subways — one of the forgotten places SHIELD had used decades ago to hide tech even they didn't fully understand.
You'd found it weeks earlier, sensing the electromagnetic anomalies with your growing senses.
Now it would be your fallback base.
The place was cramped but secure. Dim yellow lights flickered to life as you powered the internal grid with an arc battery you'd scavenged. Raze immediately dropped into an abandoned chair, ripped off his charred boots, and stretched.
"Cosy", he muttered. "For a rat hole."
You didn't respond. You were already interfacing with the repurposed SHIELD terminal at the back wall. Your fingers moved faster than before — your tactile feedback adapting with every motion, anticipating input speeds as your neural web flexed and reformed.
The screen flickered, loaded, and pulsed with a dull green interface.
A local satellite link has been established.
Then your heart stopped.
Because it wasn't just watching you.
It was tracking you.
Lines of code flashed across the screen — predictive behaviour markers, movement simulations, body temperature extrapolations.
Someone had built a model of you.
Real-time.
With remarkable accuracy.
Raze looked up. "You good?"
You narrowed your eyes.
"Someone's mapped me. Not just my patterns — my adaptations. They're trying to predict what I'll become next."
Raze whistled low. "That's... not creepy at all."
You brought up the server origin.
Anonymised. Triple-bounced.
But one tag slipped through — hidden inside a stray packet bounce.
A signature code.
DR-PNTR_Alpha
Your gut is twisted.
Doctor Pentor.
You didn't know him personally, but the name echoed in the underground: a fringe genius, obsessed with evolutionary models and predictive warfare. Some claimed he used deep-learning AI fused with mutant DNA to forecast mutant behavioural patterns.
You scanned deeper.
There it was.
PROJECT: OUROBOROS
Subject: Unknown Male – Adaptive Potential InfiniteCurrent Simulation Cycle: 23,401Projected Countermeasures: 6.2% EffectivenessStatus: Imminent ThreatProtocols: Observe, Anticipate, Terminate
You stood so quickly that your chair screeched against the rusted metal floor.
"He's planning to kill me."
Raze chuckled, cracking his neck. "Guy sounds like he just realised he can't."
You didn't laugh.
This wasn't Echo.
This wasn't HYDRA.
This was something smarter.
Worse.
Pentor wasn't just reacting. He was preparing. Studying you the way you studied enemies. Watching your every adaptation and trying to get ahead of it.
You brought up the most recent simulations. A dozen virtual models of you flickered across the screen, fighting holographic representations of known threats — Iron Man, Wolverine, Daredevil, and even someone who looked a lot like the Hulk.
In most of them, you won.
In two, you lost.
You slowed the playback.
It wasn't brute force that beat you.
It was anticipation.
One model used an energy disruption field that interfered with your cellular adaptation timing.
Another used high-frequency neural feedback to short-circuit your mimicry process before you could engage.
"They're not just studying your body," Raze said, watching over your shoulder now. "They're trying to study your mind."
You nodded grimly.
"If they can anticipate what I'll adapt to, they can find a way to stop it from happening."
You looked down at your hands.
The skin was calm now, cool. But it remembered fire. Electricity. Impact. The way it had shifted to protect you in the HYDRA collapse wasn't by choice — it had been instinct. And that instinct was getting faster.
You weren't just reacting anymore.
You were evolving ahead of threats.
But Pentor's system was trying to do the same thing — from the outside.
"I need to know how far his models go," you said. "And I need to know who's funding him."
Raze cracked his knuckles. "Then let's go knock on his door."
You shook your head. "Too soon. He'll be ready. We need an in. Someone close. Someone inside."
You accessed a background net you'd been building — a web of whispers, clues, and quiet betrayals from every black site and merc group you'd tangled with.
You found one name repeating.
Kyra Vale.
Former SHIELD. Defected after Project Insight. Rumoured to work as a data courier and fixer for high-end black market tech brokers, including Pentor's network.
More importantly, she had no known enhancements.
And she operated out of Manhattan.
Right under your nose.
Raze raised an eyebrow as her profile loaded.
"Is she cute?"
You didn't dignify it with a response.
"She's fast. Invisible to most scans. Uses tech instead of powers. If anyone knows where Pentor's servers are, she will."
You stood.
Time to move again.
But this time, it wasn't about running.
It was about striking first.