Chapter 25- Hydra defeated

  New York City – Mabel Cemetery- Oct 23, 2008 (03:33 PM)

  Steven Rogers (Captain America)

  Steve wasn't that surprised to see neither the three strangely dressed Hydra soldiers, nor Antony's suit of armor. He had already seen some videos given to him from Peggy about this whole 'Iron Man' thing Howard's sun had built. As for the special soldiers, well he had already faced more than he would like to admit of their kind too, during the war.

  But the sound of thunder that the bck-suited man produced, that did surprise him, the super soldier reacted on his instincts and ran to do a flying tackle on Antony to the ground, and as the two men nded the air above them was ripped apart.

  "I missed?" The bck-suited man muttered in surprise.

  Then the tall skinny man growled again, before jumping up onto his feet.

  That the sound of gunshots was lessening worried Steve as he hadn't gotten a chance to see how the other guards were doing or for that matter what happened to Mrs. Van Dyne. When the next dart came flying near him, he reached up and plucked it from out of the air.

  Then he climbed back up to his feet long enough to dodge twice as the green-suited man shed out with his cwed gauntlets.

  “Ease up Ghul, we're supposed to take that one in alive." The bck-suited Enhanced warned the almost feral man.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Antony use the weapons built into his palms to unch himself upright. As he did, the super soldier attacked. First, he threw the dart in his hand, and then he treated the tall man before him like a punching bag. Throwing and nding half a dozen jabs and straight punches from both hands before the suited man could unch his next swipe.

  Steve jumped back out of the tall man’s reach. He saw that the Hydra trooper he threw the dart at, was down face first into the ground. After he nded he flexed his hands, as striking that man had been about as painful as the time he punched his way out of a tank. “What are you made of?” Steve asked the Enhanced as he shook off the pain and numbness in his hands.

  "The green one uses a quantum field to protect and reinforce itself, and the bck one makes unstable quantum tunnels to destroy things. Still figuring out what the white one does, but I am guessing all three of them can become intangible for short periods of time." Antony said, Steve could barely make out his real voice from inside the suit, over the one projected one from the speaker in his suit as he spoke. As the weapons designer expined their powers, he moved to fnk the other two Enhanceds, the one in white and bck suits.

  “Very good, very good indeed. You know maybe you're right sister, maybe we should kidnap him too, and get him to fix us." The bck-suited man said while sarcastically cpping.

  “Shut up Gespenst (specter).” The female Enhanced told the one of them that liked to talk.

  Steve frowned at the German names that they used, given that none of them sounded German to him. Then again, they worked for Hydra and a good portion of their leaders came out of the Nazi party.

  The super soldier dodged a couple more swipes made by ‘Ghul', before he jumped away again, the moment when he heard the thunder noise again. The tear didn't st as long as the first one, because Antony gave the dark-suited man a bst from his palm weapons, which actually hit the man this time.

  Then Steve leaned back, as another dart passed in front of his face, but a second one finally hit him in the shoulder. The dart hissed, as whatever drugs the sniper loaded into it were injected into him.

  Then he heard the female Enhanced cry out, at first he figured she was upset that her ‘brother’ had been sent flying from the force of Antony’s weapons. But when she just disappeared in a plume of smoke, the super soldier realized that it was a cry of fear , but rather one of surprise.

  The tall green-suited Enhanced stopped and seemed to be looking around for someone instead of continuing his attack.

  But Hydra was not someone who just got a pass. So the super soldier ran passed him and delivered a pair of kicks to the back of the man's knees. Steve then waited for the man to fall to his knees before nding a pair of straight jabs into the man's helmeted chin and finishing it with a roundhouse kick to the man's head.

  “That’s it, you’re dead.” Gespenst snapped. As he rose back to his feet, the man pulled a device from the back of his suit, which extended into a bded-type weapon. Once fully extended, it seemed that it pulsed with the same energy that the man released from his arms.

  Antony fired his weapons again, first one then the other, but both passed through the man. As the bck-suited man moved to charge Steve, another plume of smoke appeared above the man. Only instead of a person vanishing, one fell out of it.

  This person was a small thin and short boy, a boy that was covered in short blue fur and had a tail growing out of his lower back. Steve reached out to warn the boy away but stopped when he saw that the boy had a bde attached to his tail and was wielding a long-bded rapier.

  The boy’s tail bde lowered ahead of him, as the boy fell, and as the bde touched Gespenst’s sword, the pulsing sword melted as the two bdes crossed. The boy vanished in another puff of smoke, just ahead of the sword exploding in a fsh of bck light.

  Steve heard, rather than saw, the boy appear behind him.

  When Antony aimed one of his palms at the boy, the super soldier took a step to block the man’s shot. “Stand down Tony, he is here to help.”

  “He is a mutant.” The weapon’s designer argued.

  “And unless your gear is defective, you’ll have noticed that he is also trying to help us stop Hydra, and he’s not alone.” Steve then pointed towards where the regur Hydra soldiers had been firing from.

  At the northern end of the cemetery, most of them were down or dead after a blonde woman in a rather skimpy outfit, wielding a bamboo and animal tooth spear, once she had appeared the woman had quickly taken them apart as any seasoned veteran could have. Said woman was now taking her time to impale any of the surviving guns with her spear, and said spear was cutting through steel like it was cardboard.

  "Ok, ok. But where is the first girl? The one in the white suit?" Antony asked as he returned his palm to his other one's target, the still kneeling Gespenst.

  Steve turned around to face the blue-furred boy.

  “You must be Steve, it is an honor to meet a war hero.” The boy waved and said to him, and then he introduced himself. “I go by the name Nightcrawler, as for the girl, I left her with my leader, he is nearby and they were talking peacefully when I left them.”

  "I assume Erik sent you," Steve asked this Nightcrawler.

  When the boy nodded, he heard Antony say inside his suit, but not broadcast it. "Jarvis, search my father's files, with keywords 'Erik' and 'mutant', zero in on his work with Captain's unit."

  “He heard that the army and the government were running tests on you, and he became worried over your health. So he organized a mission… but, we didn't expect to find you under attack from Nazis." Nightcrawler expined once he found the courage to do so.

  At the mention of the government, a pair of guards from his detail approached them. They took a moment to frown at the fur-covered boy, before they told him. "We need to get you to safety, sir. Police and the army are on their way here, they will be able to clean up this mess for us."

  When the man in a suit reached to take his arm, Steve shrugged it off and asked. "Soldier, where is Mrs. Van Dyne?"

  “Sir you are the priority….” The man started to say.

  But the super soldier cut him off shouting into his face. "Civilians are the priority soldier! What's your rank son?"

  The man backed off and paled, before answering. “I am a master sergeant, sir.”

  Steve got into the other man’s personal space of the smaller man and poked him in the chest as he told him. "Well sergeant, why don't you take some of your surviving men, and search the grounds for her? Because I can tell you right now, if she is dead, I will go to your base, grapple you, and hang you to the top of a fg pole by your underwear. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes, captain." The man muttered as he leaned back away from Steve.

  The two men ran off towards the other pair of surviving guards. As he watched them do what he asked of them, as they did the super soldier thought. ‘I failed to save six more soldiers’ lives.’

  "If my bodyguard did what I asked him to do, Janet should be with him, and away from the battlefield captain," Antony told him.

  However, Steve could hear a voice inside his suit to tell the weapons designer. “Sir, Mr. Hogan contacted me, he couldn’t locate Mrs. Van Dyne either.”

  As Steve looked over the cemetery for the woman assigned to help him integrate into the modern world, Antony added. "Well, I just got an update. Happy couldn't find her, so let's hope for the best, and she made a break for it and got away early in the battle. She is, after all, a looker, and it would be a great loss to this world if she was killed.'

  “By the way, you think that blonde bombshell is a mutant too?” the weapons designer pointed at the barely dressed woman as he asked that.

  "She isn't," Nightcrawler answered.

  “Oh really…” Tony muttered, but stopped when the voice inside his suit started to tell him the list of Eriks that Howard knew, and that the leading candidate was one Erik Lensheer.

  “Um, Captain, if you would…” the boy started to mumble.

  "Erik wants me to go with you to see him, doesn't he?" Steve guessed what the boy was trying to say. The teleporter nodded, but the super soldier's attention was on the blonde woman, as she vanished from his sight, for a fraction of a second it looked to him that her body was turning into motes of light. Then the yellow motes just fade away too.

  "Look," Antony said to get his attention. "I don't trust Magneto, that's who your friend became, by the way, a terrorist who picks fights with regur people. But if you're going to go, go now, the cops have already formed a perimeter, and the Army is about five minutes from getting here." As he was speaking Iron Man opened his helmet so they could hear his real voice near the end of his expnation.

  “Thanks, what about them?” Steve asked nodding towards the still kneeling Gespenst, and the knocked-out Ghul.

  “They’re the ones that attacked us, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” the weapons designer said before closing his face pte.

  The dark-armored one growled, before he got up and ran from them. Tony tried to tag him with his palm weapons, but a grey light shone around Gespenst as he let the shots pass through him, before running through the headstones and other decorations in the cemetery.

  Steve was pretty sure that he could chase the man down, but Antony was right, if he was going to go see Erik he should do so soon. So he used the sights and sounds of Iron Man trying to capture Gespenst, to fade away from the battlefield. Near the main groundkeeper's building, Steve crouched beside a bush, and then he heard Nightcrawler appear next to him.

  “All right, where to from here?” He asked the boy as if he always knew he was going to teleport there.

  "I will be honest, I have never tried to move someone as big as you before now, but now, we teleport." The boy pressed something on his rapier, and it shorted to be a shorter broad-bded cutss before he sheathed it. Then he reached up and grabbed Steve by both of his biceps. They were then enveloped by a cloud of gas and sulfur, and for a fraction of a second, the super soldier could see that they fell into some sort of hellscape, before they fell through another hole and they were standing on top of a building’s roof.

  Nightcrawler looked dizzy and weak, so Steve helped steady the boy.

  As he did he could hear someone speaking behind him. “…As I said I don’t need to Appraise them to know that curing you will kill them, that isn’t to say that I can’t cure them, but I doubt they will be as healthy or as strong as you remember them being.”

  "You say that like you know everything, you don't know everything, mister." An angry woman snapped at the first speaker.

  "I may not know how your powers work, but I certainly know how your genetics do. And I am telling you, you are keeping them alive. I suspect if you went away from them your powers would become even more unstable, and they would get weaker and weaker over time… This may not be what you want to hear, but oftentimes the truth is." The man told the woman.

  Steve looked around and over his shoulder; he saw a gathering of five people. The first he recognized was the woman in the white suit, unlike before she had taken her helmet off. Steve was willing to bet that she was of mixed heritage as while her skin had a natural tan to it, but from the shape of her face and bone structure, he could also see Eastern European in her, especially in her brilliant blue eyes.

  She was arguing with a man whose origin Steve could not pce, as while he was clearly Caucasian in skin tone, and yet his face was all over the pce, having signs that either marked him as from the Middle East, but also the shape of his eyes and forehead made him think that he was from the far East. His eyes were the real eye-catching, as not only were they filled completely with color, unlike normal people. They also glowed like a dying fshlight.

  However, it was the second person that he recognized that got the super soldier's attention. The older man standing with his palm outstretched towards the female Enhanced. He was older, not nearly as old-looking as Peggy was, but he was clearly his old comrade from the war. Erik Lensheer, now more commonly known in the world as Magneto.

  DLRhanna