In front of the heavy door to the sterile isolation ward, the two agents standing guard slumped beside the doorway. Lucian flicked his hand, and the alloy door shattered on the spot.
Inside the ward, the instruments emitted a monotonous ticking.
Nick Fury, his body covered in tubes and a breathing mask strapped over his face, remained in a deep coma.
Lucian walked up to the bed and looked at the one-eyed spymaster.
Powerful psychic power blasted through the mental firewall in Fury's subconscious without ceremony, brutally rifling through the old fox's most deeply buried, top-secret memories.
A torrent of information flooded back.
Cold War espionage, Captain Marvel's departure, the early formation of the Avengers Initiative...
Suddenly, Lucian's gaze stopped on a memory fragment protected by multiple layers of encryption.
It was before the Battle of New York broke out.
Nick Fury stood in a dimly lit secret room, issuing orders to several Skrulls whose green-skinned bodies were gradually shifting into the forms of human agents:
"Activate the Harvest Plan. On any battlefield involving nonhuman powers, whether it's scraps of flesh crushed under the Hulk's feet or blood spilled by a god, put it all into vacuum test tubes. This is humanity's last trump card. No one touches it but me."
Lucian withdrew his fingers, the corner of his mouth twitching despite himself.
That scheming old bastard.
Sure enough, Nick Fury had been using the Skrulls to scavenge everywhere and collect superheroes' blood samples from the very beginning!
Even the bloodstains on the battlefield in New York had all been quietly drained and packaged by those lizards under the guise of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s cleanup operations.
Lucian turned and left the ward. Following the coordinates in Fury's mind, he descended all the way into the depths of the Cold War nuclear bunker