Shadow's greed, Natasha's demands

The Quinjet's exhaust flames tore through the Siberia polar night snowstorm as it soared into the sky at its maximum angle of attack, reaching an altitude of 10,000 meters.

Inside the cabin, the heating system was running at full power, but it still couldn't dispel the suffocatingly low air pressure. The roar of the engine was filtered into a muffled hum by the thick soundproofing, and the entire space felt as sticky as a lump of glue about to solidify.

Lynn stood beside the makeshift medical bed, holding medical alcohol and gauze in her hands.

Natasha lay on the metal bed. Her black special operations suit had been completely cut open, and a laceration several centimeters long was oozing blood from her abdomen. The powerful healing gel left by Gwen Stacy covered the wound, emitting a faint hissing sound as the cells were forcibly dividing and healing.

Any agent who had suffered such a severe injury would have been unconscious from the pain by now.

But Natasha did not.

Her emerald-green eyes were fixed on Lynn, unblinking. There was no fear of pain in her eyes, only a deep, almost overflowing, infatuation.

"Sir..."

Natasha's voice was terribly hoarse, like sandpaper rubbing against glass, yet it also possessed a deadly sweetness.

She raised her right hand, stained with half-dried blood, her fingertips precisely hooking onto the hem of Lynn's tactical uniform, slowly climbing upwards. Finally, her cold fingers stopped on the side of Lynn's neck.

There was a clear, still bloody tooth mark there.

"Does it still hurt?" Natasha gently stroked the bite mark, a seductive smile curving her lips. "I bit too hard. But on that rainy night in Budapest, when you carried me out of the pile of corpses in the sewers, I wanted to do it."

Lynn lowered her eyes, looking at the once aloof and deadly Black Widow.

The "Budapest Death-Defying Protection" memory implanted by the system was like the most potent poison, completely destroying her psychological Defense Line. The Natasha of today is no longer S.H.I.E.L.D..'s ace, but a mad dog tethered by obsession.

"Save your energy, Natasha." Lynn didn't push her hand away, but instead used tweezers to pick up a cotton ball soaked in alcohol and ruthlessly pressed it onto the bloodstains at the edge of her abdominal wound.

The alcohol irritated the rolled-up flesh.

Natasha didn't even flinch. Instead, she grabbed Lynn's wrist and pressed her burning cheek against his palm. She greedily inhaled the lingering smell of gunpowder and blood on Lynn's hands.

"You know what, Lynn. When that monster stabbed me in the stomach, I didn't feel any pain at all." Natasha didn't back down; instead, she leaned closer, her full chest pressed against Lynn's arm. "Because all I could think about was you. I was thinking, if I died, would you remember me forever?"

"Has your brain been frozen, Agent Romanoff?" Lynn said flatly. "Dead men are worthless."

"Then why did you come to save me? You could have just taken the hard drive." Natasha's smile widened as she brought her lips close to Lynn's ear, her breath sweet as orchids. "I'm entrusting my life to you, Lynn. As long as you keep watching me, I'll kill anyone for you..."

"Bang!"

Less than two meters from the medical bed, a row of seats forged from Special Alloy suddenly emitted a shrill, twisting sound. It was as if an invisible giant hand had squeezed them tightly, and the thick steel plates were crushed into a lump of scrap iron, with screws flying off and smashing against the bulkhead, sending sparks flying.

Wanda stood up.

Her dark red trench coat fluttered in the still cabin. Her pupils were completely swallowed by Scarlet. Chaos Particles, like living venomous snakes, danced wildly on her pale fingertips, emitting crackling energy bursts.

The temperature inside the cabin plummeted, and condensation dripped down the walls, instantly freezing into frost. The barometric pressure alarm began flashing a blinding red light. The clouds outside the window were affected by the overflowing magical energy, turning the originally gray-white cumulonimbus clouds into a blood-red hue. The fighter jet violently lurched at an altitude of ten thousand meters, its fuselage groaning under the strain.

"Take your filthy hands off him."

Wanda's voice wasn't loud, but it carried a kind of imposing Deity authority.

Two Scarlet energy chains coalesced in mid-air, like venomous snakes striking, locking onto Natasha's throat.

Natasha didn't even glance at Wanda. She simply tightened her grip on Lynn's hand, a provocative smirk playing on her lips.

"Little girl, do you think you can possess him just because you have power?" Natasha's voice carried a battle-hardened contempt. "You have no idea what he's been through. You'll only cause him trouble like a runaway bomb. As for me, I can help him clear everything away."

"You're asking for it!"

Wanda's rationality completely collapsed.

The Scarlet Chains materialized into sharp blades, tearing through the air and slashing straight at Natasha's face.

The fighter jet's left engine was hit by this violent magical force, instantly bursting into a blinding flash of fire. The fuselage tilted sharply to the left, and a feeling of weightlessness instantly enveloped the entire cockpit.

Lynn did not back down.

He grabbed Natasha's wrist and forced her back onto the medical bed. At the same time, his left hand reached into his tactical pouch at his waist, and two syringes filled with a dark blue liquid fell into his palm.

This was a "special medicine" he concocted using the super-physical blood rewarded by the system, mixed with the highest concentration of neurotoxins from Hydra.

That's enough.

Lynn's voice wasn't loud, but it pierced precisely through the roar of the engine.

He didn't use magic, but relied on the extreme explosive power brought by the Super-Soldier Serum, his legs suddenly exerting force. His military boots dented the metal floor.

His body left a trail of afterimages inside the tilted cabin.

"Puff!"

The first syringe plunged mercilessly into Natasha's carotid artery. The pale blue liquid was instantly injected by the thumb.

Before the morbid obsession in Natasha's eyes could fade, the powerful effects of the drug severed her nerve conduction. She groaned softly, her body collapsing limply onto the bed, leaving only her eyes still fixed on Lynn with resentment.

Almost simultaneously, using the momentum of the tilting fuselage, Lynn twisted his waist and appeared directly in front of Wanda.

Wanda's Chaos Blade was less than three centimeters from Lynn's chest. The violent magic even scorched the collar of Lynn's tactical uniform.

"Lynn..." Wanda instinctively withdrew her magic, afraid that the destructive energy would scratch him.

The moment she lowered her guard, Lynn's large hand grabbed the back of her fair neck.

"I said, that's enough." Lynn's eyes were as cold as ice, devoid of any pity. The second syringe pierced Wanda's shoulder with precision.

The sedative circulated through the bloodstream, forcibly suppressing the riotous Chaos Particles.

The Scarlet in Wanda's eyes faded quickly, replaced by extreme grievance and panic. She tried to grab Lynn's clothes, but her hands had lost all strength.

"You yelled at me because of her..."

A tear slid down Wanda's cheek, and she finally collapsed weakly into Lynn's arms, falling into a deep sleep.

The red lights inside the cabin finally went out.

The backup engine started, and the autopilot system corrected the course. The fighter jet resumed its smooth flight above the clouds.

Lynn carried the unconscious Wanda to the intact seat and fastened her seatbelt. Then, he turned and walked to the control panel at the front of the cabin.

He pulled up a chair and sat down, then took the miniature hard drive stained with Natasha's blood from the pocket of his tactical uniform.

This hard drive was retrieved by Natasha from deep within the Siberia base at great personal risk.

Lynn inserted the hard drive into the fighter jet's central terminal.

The screen flickered twice, then a black screen appeared, prompting for a password. The Hydra skull logo slowly rotated in the center of the screen.

Lynn recalled Natasha's whispered words in his ear and quickly typed a few letters on the keyboard: BUDAPEST.

"Bite."

Permissions unlocked.

Massive amounts of data cascaded down the screen like a waterfall. Lynn's gaze swept quickly across the Hydra infiltrator lists, fund flows, and records of unfinished biochemical experiments.

Finally, his gaze settled on a separate folder that was encrypted multiple times.

The folder's name consists of only a few letters: [Blind Spot Blind Spot Program].

Lynn raised an eyebrow and opened the file.

What came into view was not weapon blueprints, but an extremely complex energy frequency code.

Below the code was a blurry photo. The photo showed an old-fashioned two-way pager with a red and blue eight-pointed Starbrand lit up on the screen.

Lynn's pupils suddenly contracted.

Nick Fury, that old coin, always has a trump card up his sleeve. He actually used Hydra's resources to secretly build a hyperspace communication node capable of traversing galaxies in the Winter Soldier Program's backup database.

This is why, even after S.H.I.E.L.D.. was destroyed and Fury was driven to the brink of Extremis, he still did not completely despair.

He's waiting for the woman who can single-handedly destroy a planet in the universe to return.

Just as Lynn was about to completely delete the code for this frequency band, the terminal screen suddenly turned blood red.

A line of eye-catching warning characters popped up:

[WARNING: This frequency band has been activated. The target's arrival time is...]