Yelena didn't wait.
She rushed forward, dropped her center of gravity, and slammed a punch right into Ross's face. Well, she kinda held back. Tony wanted Ross alive after all.
There was a wet crack.
His nose flattened like a kicked-in tent. His body shot backward, slammed against the metal wall with a loud clang, and left a human-shaped dent.
Ross groaned, grabbing his face, blood dripping between his fingers.
But then…
"Kekeke! Heheheh!" He started laughing.
Not the calm, confident kind.
The I have lost every marble kind.
Yelena stared at him, arms folded, foot tapping.
"You... you feel that?" Ross gasped out, blood running down his chin. "I feel alive!"
She tilted her head. "Yeah, that's the adrenaline. You want a gold star?"
Ross pushed off the wall, wobbling slightly, but a crazed smile plastered across his face. He stumbled forward like a drunk brawler seeing double. With a loud, unintelligible yell, he swung a punch at her chest.
Yelena didn't even move.
THUNK.
Ross's knuckles collided with the nanite armor.
There was a disgusting crunch. His wrist bent backward at an angle wrists were not supposed to bend.
Ross howled, stumbling back, clutching his shattered hand.
Yelena blinked. Once. Twice.
She pointed at his wrist with pure deadpan energy. "Did you seriously just try to punch reinforced armor with your bare hand?"
Ross, wild-eyed and shaking, screamed, "I feel no pain!"
He threw another punch with his left hand, aiming for her helmet.
THUNK.
Another horrible snap.
Ross immediately dropped to his knees, clutching his now broken left hand too, gasping like a dying fish.
Yelena's eye twitched. She stepped back just slightly, staring at him like he was the dumbest creature she had ever encountered.
"Uumm..." She was kinda lost for words.
Ross slammed his broken fists against the floor, howling like a wounded animal. His voice bounced off the metal walls, raw and desperate.
"This isn't right!" he roared, veins bulging at his temples. "The serum was supposed to work! It was supposed to...!"
Yelena crouched a few feet away, resting her elbow on her knee, watching him with mild curiosity, like he was some drunk at a party making a fool of himself. She cocked her head. "Serum, huh? Who made it? Because, buddy, you look about as superhuman as a wet sandwich."
Ross's eyes were wild, bloodshot. His voice cracked as he spat out the name. "Norman. Norman Osborn!"
Yelena clapped her hands once, slow and mocking. "Wow. Wow. Hold on." She stood up straight and wiped an imaginary tear from her eye. "You... trusted Norman Osborn? After you and your government buddies cut his funding, tried to blacklist him, and gave him what...? Like a week?"
Ross didn't answer. He just panted, cradling his ruined hands.
"And now that I think about it. Norman never gave you that serum, you mofo stole it from his lab after he disappeared, right? Hahahaha! I guess, Norman expected something like this to happen and... Hahaha..."
"My SSS Serum.. no, no, no... It can't be... No." Ross kept mumbling.
Yelena stepped closer, boots clicking against the floor. She leaned down just a little, voice syrupy sweet.
"You thought the guy you stabbed in the back was gonna hand you the key to becoming the next Captain America? You seriously thought that? And you thought me here wearing this high-tech suit with scanners and boosters of all kinds, let you just drink a super serum without stopping you? You really are a retard."
Ross glared at her through the pain, but the hatred in his eyes was dull and empty now.
She smiled wider. "He gave you an adrenaline shot, you moron. A cheap one. Probably expired. And you drank it like it was liquid gold."
She turned, pacing in a slow circle around him.
Yelena has already done a double scan on Ross and his blood, just in case. Can't be too careful. But nope. Nothing. He was just a regular human.
"You thought you were about to break the world," she said, almost kindly. "But Norman... he broke you first. Just a nice, warm rush to make you feel invincible for about... a few seconds."
Ross shook with rage, blood dripping from his shattered knuckles. "I'll kill him... I'll kill all of you..."
Yelena stopped behind him, her tone dropping to ice.
"You living under the rocks? Norman is dead," she said. "You're done. You're a relic. A sad, broken old man whose own ego finally caught up with him."
Ross tried to rise, tried to summon something of the soldier he used to be, but his legs buckled. He fell flat, face smashing into the cold steel floor with a wet smack.
Yelena crouched next to him again, tapping the side of her helmet to activate comms.
"Package secured. Dumb as a rock but breathing."
She paused, grinning under the helmet.
"Permission to kick him once?"
Tony's voice crackled through her earpiece, dry and amused. "Just once. Don't break anything important."
Yelena didn't need a second invitation.
She stood over Ross, measured the angle like she was lining up a golf shot, and sent a sharp, brutal kick straight into his groin.
There was a wet, pitiful grunt. His body jolted once and then went limp.
Yelena tilted her head. "Hmm. That looked satisfying."
She pulled a coil of electric rope from her belt. With efficient, almost lazy movements, she flipped Ross over, ignoring the pathetic groans escaping his bloodied lips. The rope wrapped tight around his wrists and ankles, crackling to life with a low hum as it hardened into a locking sequence. No way he was going anywhere, even if he woke up.
She slung him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, dragging his sorry weight back toward the bridge.
Sliding into the captain's seat, Yelena hacked the manual control interface. It was old-school, analog heavy, a pain in the ass, but nothing she couldn't figure out with a few minutes and some creative violence toward the control panel.
Sub thrusters engaged.
Yelena guided it back to the Horizon Island.
...
[Meanwhile...] [Ross' base]
At what was left of Ross's secret base, Tony and the Widows moved fast.
The survivors lay scattered across the field, groaning, broken, barely alive. Some were missing limbs. Others were so deep in shock they didn't even register the world around them.
Tony didn't hesitate. He activated the bio-nanite deployment system on his left gauntlet, a cloud of microscopic machines surging from his palm. The Widows followed suit, directing streams of shimmering mist toward the wounded.
The nanites latched onto the injured soldiers, weaving new flesh, fusing broken bones, repairing shattered organs with a quiet, almost reverent efficiency. Within seconds, the worst of the dying stabilized. Those too far gone and were one breath away from dying were brought back thanks to the regeneration properties in his bio-nanites.
However, too many died... Too much blood spilled...
Tony didn't flinch. Death was still death. But the ones he could save, he did.
"Tony!" one of the Widows called out, pointing at the mutated humans.
The remains of the mutated goblins... Dead now, but still radiating faint, unstable bio-signatures.
Tony pulled out a series of sample vials and containment capsules. Carefully, methodically, the team harvested blood, tissue, and bone marrow. Every cell could tell a story. Every cell might lead to answers about the nightmare Ross tried to unleash.
Once finished, he stood back, surveying the grim harvest. The survivors from the tactical team thanked them for saving their lives. Tony asked them to take the remnants of their comrades and clear the area which they did without a question.
Within fifteen minutes they cleared the area. Tony made sure to scan each of them for blood traces from those monsters before letting them go.
Then...
"Burn them down. Don't leave a single trace of these monstrosities," Tony ordered.
The Widows flew around dropping incendiary grenades, burning down all the traces of mutated humans to prevent others like the government or any other shadow agency from using them to create another army of monsters.
The stench of burning flesh swept over the area...
They regrouped at the base's ruined command center.
Or what was left of it.
The doors were ripped open, the inside scorched black. Terminals smashed. Servers reduced to molten slag. Files burnt to ash.
Someone had cleaned house before the Widows ever arrived.
Tony scanned the wreckage, helmet visor flickering through layers of detection.
Nothing salvageable.
Not even a trace.
He let out a sharp breath through his teeth. "Son of a bitch. He torched everything. Well, Yelena got Ross, so that's a good thing. Let's go."
He turned and walked out of the command center.
The Widows followed.
They rose into the sky as one, repulsors flaring soft blue under the dark clouds.
The wind howled around them.
The blood and smoke of the battlefield faded beneath their feet.
The night swallowed them whole.
But this war?
It was just beginning.
...
The storm above was endless. Winds screamed across the frozen wasteland, drowning the world in white.
Buried deep beneath the glacier, the ancient facility stirred.
Not a place of science.
A place of survival.
A place where rules had died long ago.
At its heart, inside a dark steel chamber lined with analog machines and humming life-support units, an old man sat.
The body was more machine than flesh now. Spinal tubes. Metal ribs. Synthetic blood is circulating through plastic veins. But his mind. His mind was sharp. Too sharp.
He watched the monitor. Lines of information scrolled across the cracked screen. News feeds. Intelligence reports. Satellite intercepts. Emergency communications.
Oscorp Executive: Dead.
General Thaddeus Ross: Captured.
Unidentified Hostile Force: Detected.
He leaned closer.
Grainy footage played.
Black armored figures moving with terrifying speed.
Nanite clouds healing the wounded.
Metal and flesh fused together in ways he had only theorized, never achieved.
He slowed the footage. Frame by frame.
The armor. Too advanced. Not military. Not Oscorp.
He froze the frame and sat back, mind racing.
Decades... No, a century of work. Attempts to merge man and machine. To create hybrids that wouldn't rot, wouldn't die, wouldn't betray.
And now... someone had done it.
Someone had built what he had only dreamed. No, they did it even better.
His machines whirred louder around him as his heart rate spiked. The life-support systems pumped faster, trying to keep pace with the surge of adrenaline his failing body could barely survive.
"Phew! Things just got interesting..."
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AN: Just to confirm, it ain't who you think he is. But feel free to guess. He'll be the big villain during the space arc.
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[1] Ch: 79 [Pain is a Language]
Ch: 80 [Gods and Ghosts]
Ch: 81 [No More Leashes]
Ch: 82 [Out of Ice]
Ch: 83 [The Tesseract & Captain]