Strucker had planned for the Avengers. By the time the eastern wall collapsed, he understood that every plan had assumed the wrong number of monsters.
Noctis crossed the outer defences above the road, more than seven feet of black Uru and red-lit seams beneath a ragged cloak. The horned skull of his helm turned towards the first battery. Men who had watched New York or the security feeds from France dropped their rifles. Three sank to their knees before he reached the wall.
The automated turrets continued firing.
Dreadspire appeared in his hand. The black staff hovered next to him, and every round stopped in a shallow curve before him. Magnetism stripped the weapons from their mounts. Matter Transmutation softened the steel inside their housings, while Telekinesis folded the emplacements inward until each became a compact block around its own ammunition.
Across the courtyard, one block passed through an armoured vehicle from front to back. Another broke the reinforced doors beneath Strucker's command room and continued into the passage beyond. The last turned through the line of soldiers still firing, changed direction twice, and returned to hover beside Lucius without a drop of blood ruining his armour. The slightly threatening design deserved to be kept clean.
Thor landed near the breach with lightning following Mjolnir into the ground. The discharge spread through two gun crews and climbed the metal stairs towards a third. Men fell against the rails, smoking but alive enough to complain.
"Your restraint remains admirable, shield-brother," Thor called over the channel.
"Most of them are still breathing."
Tony passed above them in his new armour. The dark-gold force field Lucius had fitted over it caught autocannon fire, brightening with every impact while the armour beneath remained untouched.
"Your metal cube says otherwise," Tony said.
Lucius accelerated the waiting block through another firing position. "Then stop counting."
"That's the spirit."
Strucker heard the exchange through three captured frequencies while another tactical display died at a gesture from Noctis's staff. The cameras nearest the command room survived long enough to show the attacker approaching.
Banner removed the west gate with one strike. When its hinges failed, the Hulk caught the upper edge and threw the entire section into a bunker that had survived the first bombardment. Concrete opened beneath it. Thor met the soldiers driven from the ruin and scattered them with the flat of Mjolnir and a burst of lightning that turned the snow to steam.
Rogers advanced behind his shield through the centre. Romanoff and Barton worked the lower road, Wilson cut across the gun towers, and none of them received the golden protection that made Stark's armour glow in the smoke. Noctis had agreed to accompany Tony. Every other participant remained an administrative coincidence.
A rifleman rose behind Thor. Lucius caught the bullet before it reached the prince's back, sent it through the rifleman's knee, then closed the shallow cut across Thor's cheek with Healing before the blood could reach his beard.
Thor touched the unmarked skin. "A worthy defence."
"He healed your face," Tony said.
"He is my Shield Brother, Playboy. Stop being jealous, or Pepper might send you to the couch again."
A rocket struck Tony's shell before he could snipe back a retort and drove one shoulder into the masonry. JARVIS began reporting a bruise beneath the plate; Healing erased it before the sentence finished.
"You are expensive."
"I own sixty per cent of the corporation."
"Then stop damaging my forty per cent." The shell around Tony thickened as he entered another firing lane.
Below him, Natasha crossed between two concrete barriers. The first burst missed. The second struck high in her left shoulder and turned her into the cover before she completed the step.
Lucius had already found the shooter. A telekinetic grip drew the man through the firing slit, narrowing him where the opening demanded it, and dropped what remained beside the barrier.
Natasha pressed one hand against the wound. Blood worked between her fingers while she changed magazines with the other.
Lucius looked at the shoulder, confirmed that the round had passed through, and turned away. Steve saw him do it.
"Noctis, heal her."
The order reached Lucius as Tony broke through the lower doors. For one moment nothing changed. Then Steve left the ground.
Telekinesis pulled him across the courtyard hard enough to tear his boots through the snow. He brought the shield up before the wall of black armour reached him.
Dreadspire touched its edge, and Molecular Manipulation entered the Vibranium through a working channel, narrowed and refined by the staff's runes. The polished rim darkened beneath the silver skull. A blackened channel spread several inches along the curve, pitted, and began falling away in brittle flakes.
Steve's eyes widened. His grip shifted behind the damaged shield, and the surprise disappeared beneath something colder.
"You were warned, Rogers."
Lucius let him fall. The snow broke beneath Steve's shoulder, but he rolled, kept the shield between them, and rose without returning the attack. Natasha had reached him by then, her injured arm tight against her body.
"Not here," she said.
"There will not be a better place."
"There won't be a better outcome either."
Lucius left them with that problem. The rifleman who had dropped his weapon and remained kneeling near the wall watched the demonic figure pass him. Relief loosened the man's face.
Dreadspire's lower end tapped the ground. Matter Transmutation softened the frozen earth beneath the kneeling man, and Telekinesis pulled him under before the ground hardened again. The snow settled over the place without leaving a body to recover. As Lucius continued towards the castle, Strucker stopped waiting for a defence to hold.
-
Wanda and Pietro stood beside the sceptre when the locks released.
The chamber between their rooms had been cleared of technicians. The sceptre rested inside its transparent housing, blue crystal around a yellow brilliance that HYDRA's instruments continued failing to describe. Behind the glass, the battle moved across silent displays. Noctis passed through men and walls. The Hulk changed the shape of the western approach. Thor and Stark reached the castle.
Strucker entered with two guards he no longer expected to matter.
"It is time," he told Wanda.
Pietro glanced from him to the monitors. "For us to save the people who locked us in separate rooms?"
"For you to destroy the people responsible for every room you have needed since Novi Grad." Strucker looked at Wanda. "Only you possess the power to shatter them."
Pietro's attention settled on Stark's armoured image moving through the lower castle. Wanda felt the same old pressure gather behind her brother's silence. They had joined HYDRA with one target in their minds.
They looked at one another, and the smile reached both faces at nearly the same moment.
Pietro vanished. Papers crossed the chamber in his wake.
Wanda remained beside the glass. Stark would come for the sceptre.
She knew the story that had carried them to this room. Django and Marya Maximoff had been their parents in every way that mattered to memory. Their hands had put food on the table. Their voices had answered in the dark, and they had died when the first shell tore through the building in Novi Grad, leaving two ten-year-old children beneath a bed with a second missile three feet from their faces and STARK painted along its side.
For two days, every scrape of rescue through the rubble had sounded like the last thing they would hear.
Wanda did not know that Django and Marya had received two stolen children. She did not know that Erik Lehnsherr and Natalia Maximoff, a Romani witch, were the blood behind both of them, or that another power had taken the twins, experimented into what they had inherited, and deemed them failures before handing them to the couple who raised them.
The intervention had buried their mutations without erasing them. Wanda's Telepathy and Telekinesis had survived in weak, intermittent expressions. Pietro's speed had waited behind restraints he could feel without naming.
The Mind Stone had not granted either mutation. HYDRA's experiments tore through the old suppression and magnified what was already there. In Wanda, the sceptre also layered something else over her mind, an unstable pressure that behaved like magic to resist every name Strucker's programme offered it.
None of that changed the parents she remembered or the name on the missile.
Wanda left the chamber and moved towards the concealed laboratory.
-
The castle interior gave Tony a brief opportunity to regret asking Lucius for help.
Locks disengaged before the armoured menace reached them. Where no lock existed, the surrounding wall decided it had always contained a doorway. Lucius walked beside Tony with Dreadspire in one hand and the face of the horned helm withdrawn, explaining Romani witchcraft as though the assault were an inconvenient laboratory tour.
"Romani witchcraft isn't one thing," Lucius said. "Every family hoards different tricks. Blood helps it to carry it to the next generation, and training keeps the stupid ones alive."
Tony scanned the next junction. Heat signatures moved away from them rather than towards them. "Magic recipes? Burn the wrong ingredient to lose a relative."
"You're finally learning."
"How much of this did you learn in Asgard?"
"Enough."
"Books or brains?"
"Whatever was closer."
Tony stepped over a HYDRA rifle bent around its owner's hands. "And the brainwashing under your mountain?"
"I redid it."
"Because the first brainwashing wasn't brainwashy enough?"
"Because Gary can supervise a Nexus cycle and still can't pick up a fucking ball without an order."
Tony looked sideways at him. "You made a super-soldier too stupid to play fetch."
"Too obedient. The stupidity came free."
"Your private army is doing great."
"I do not have an army."
"You have hundreds of armed men under a mountain somewhere out there."
"They're employees, Playboy, and those are my rifles."
"That doesn't help."
"I wasn't trying to help."
Tony's faceplate hid his expression. "This is me trying to make you less impossible for everyone else."
"Don't bother."
"You rotted posterboy's shield."
"He ordered me around."
"Natasha was bleeding."
"Yes."
Tony waited. Lucius kept walking. He was aware of the bad blood between Romanoff and Lucius.
The corridor ended at a broad stone wall with an ordinary wooden door set several feet to the right. Tony's scan found a hollow space and a mechanism behind the masonry, and he raised one arm towards the concealed seam.
"Secret door, who would've thought?"
Dreadspire was already pointing at it. Lucius looked at Tony without changing expression.
"You could let me have one."
-
Wanda waited inside the darkened laboratory, where the unlit equipment gave her enough shadow to watch Stark enter.
Tony's armour came first beneath Lucius's dark-gold shell. The horned figure followed through the opening with Dreadspire touching the floor beside him. Seeing Noctis through a monitor had reduced him to height and armour. In the room, the skulls over the black plates and the red light beneath their seams gave his stillness more threat than movement would have managed.
His helm turned towards her. Wanda's green eyes widened, and she stopped breathing. Stark continued towards the central platform with his attention on the sceptre beyond the glass and the machines around it.
'Well, aren't you pretty.'
Lucius's voice entered her mind.
Wanda stepped back. Her power rose by instinct, but the touch did not strike or force its way deeper. It moved along the surface of her thoughts with deliberate softness, carrying enough restrained weight to make the sceptre's pressure feel distant.
'Relax, babe. I won't spoil your ambush.'
Her eyes stayed on the red gaze of his faceplate.
'Why?'
'Tony is my friend. He is also a stubborn bastard. I want to see what this makes him build.'
The pressure of his amusement touched her mind. Wanda could not tell whether he had answered honestly or merely selected a truth shaped like mockery.
'We will meet again, Wanda Maximoff. You can pay me back then.'
She had spent months inside HYDRA's secured wing, close enough to the Mind Stone to feel it press against her powers. Noctis made that pressure seem distant. The thought of owing him anything sent a colder sensation down her spine than the armour.
Wanda raised one hand towards Stark.
Dark crimson gathered between her fingers. Black ran through its centre, curling like smoke or shadow without becoming either as the unstable force followed her Telepathy into his mind. Before the platform, Stark went still and his raised hand lowered by inches.
Fear opened beneath her.
She found an army through a hole in the sky, broken armour, dead companions, and Stark alive long enough to believe every death belonged to him. Wanda pressed the vision around that belief and left his own mind to make it worse.
Beside him, Lucius's skull faceplate withdrew into the horned helm.
He winked at her.
Wanda stared for half a second, then a thin smile answered before she disappeared through the side passage.
Tony remained trapped inside the nightmare.
-
Lucius approached the sceptre after Wanda left.
The yellow Stone inside its blue housing offered no voice, yet every sense he directed towards it found structured activity. Telepathy touched a living architecture without discovering a human mind. Technopathy found instruction without machinery. Cosmic Energy moved through the lattice in paths that resembled thought while refusing the limitations of nerves, metal or code.
Tony had wanted the sceptre because that structure might solve the intelligence he was training.
Lucius approved of the plan once it included a modest acquisition fee. He laid Dreadspire across the housing, letting the staff refine his control while Molecular Manipulation opened the metal and crystal around the Stone without touching the Stone itself. Telekinesis lifted the yellow gem from its seat.
The bonded Reality Stone stirred inside him. Using one Infinity Stone to strike another before studying the result would have been poor procurement, so Lucius held the Mind Stone inside nested fields without forcing it, fed Cosmic Energy around its surface, and read the neural lattice until its repeating links became a design rather than an impression.
The Stone disappeared into Inventory.
Cosmic Energy collected above his palm. Matter Transmutation gave the energy density, colour and a crystalline body, while the Reality Stone held the changing structure stable as Lucius copied the Mind Stone's outer lattice into the substitute. He did not attempt to create a second Infinity Stone. That boundary separated ambitious engineering from suicide performed with excellent posture.
The counterfeit needed less. It received a neural architecture complex enough for JARVIS and Tony to recognise as something beyond conventional code, along with the ability to accept power, return organised activity, and sustain the connections Tony would mistake for an invitation. Lucius fed it a reserve of Cosmic Energy large enough to survive decades and the work that followed. Commanding minds belonged to the real Stone. Tony and Banner would supply the intelligence, fear would supply the decision, and Wanda had already supplied the first push.
Lucius placed the substitute inside the sceptre. The housing closed around it, blue light crossed the metal, and the laboratory instruments resumed their old readings. They found the same shape of impossible answer and failed in the same respectable manner.
Behind him, Tony watched his dead friends through Wanda's vision. Lucius returned Dreadspire to his hand and considered the counterfeit, the stolen Stone, and the catastrophe now waiting for Stark to wake.
The best gifts became invoices later.