The darkness before dawn

The train raced through the dark curtain of rain, the roar of steel wheels striking the rails drowning out the heavy breathing inside the carriage.

This was a fully sealed carriage dedicated to transporting "Class D biohazardous waste." To ordinary people, it was the gateway to hell, but to veteran cleaners like Zhao Fan and Old Dog, it was merely another "office."

Zhao Fan leaned against the cold carriage wall, his chest rising and falling slightly with each breath. That brief burst of action-taking a bullet with his body, then shattering his opponent's hand bones with [Kinetic Repulsion]-had looked fluid, but it had actually consumed an enormous amount of stamina.

Weak Energy Perception, deactivate.

He repeated the command silently, and the faint glimmers representing energy flows gradually faded from his vision, returning the world to dim reality.

"Whew... this damned smell." Old Dog walked to the corner and dragged the unconscious agent in black out from beneath the pile of scrap metal. He expertly stripped off the man's tactical belt and found a communicator, a Glock pistol, and two tactical grenades. "Still, it's a pretty good hiding place. Those suits hate getting their leather shoes dirty."

Dr. Evelyn Reed was curled up between several enormous lead-sealed drums, her face pale. She still clutched the silver briefcase tightly, the only lifeline she could hold on to amid this chaos. The gunfire and fight had happened so quickly that even now, her hands were still trembling slightly.

"Is he... dead?" Evelyn looked at the agent, his face covered in blood and his wrist twisted at a grotesque angle, her voice slightly hoarse.

"Not yet, but he's close." Zhao Fan walked over, crouched down, and pressed a finger against the agent's carotid artery. His pulse was weak but rapid, a precursor to shock. "Old Dog, toss me the first-aid kit. This man can't die yet."

"Save him?" Old Dog grumbled, but he still pulled a first-aid kit looted from their previous hideout out of his backpack and tossed it over. "Fan, do you think we're not conspicuous enough? Dragging along dead weight, and dead weight that wants to kill us at that."

"He's not dead weight. He's our pass." Zhao Fan tore open the first-aid kit and took out a dose of adrenaline and some hemostatic gel. His movements were rough and effective, without any of a medical professional's gentleness, intended only to maintain this organism's basic vital signs.

"Ben," Zhao Fan pressed his earpiece, "if you're not done puking yet, we need you to get to work."

Benjamin Lee's muffled retching and the sound of typing came through the earpiece. "Boss... this carriage is too bumpy, and the smell reminds me of the nightmare of working at that Indian takeout place... give me two minutes."

"We're entering Washington, D.C., the most heavily defended place in the world, especially tonight." Zhao Fan calmly analyzed the situation as he dressed the prisoner's wounds. "S.H.I.E.L.D., or rather Hydra, must have sealed every route in and out by now. This train might be hauling garbage, but there'll still be a routine inspection at its destination-the D.O.D.C. processing center on the Potomac River."

He raised his head and stared coldly at the unconscious prisoner. "We need his identification code and his communications frequency. Ben, I want you to 'borrow' his identity and overwrite our wanted notices in the system."

"You mean... pose as escort agents?" Some reason finally returned to Benjamin's voice. "That's going to be difficult, Boss. Their communications are encrypted and linked to biometrics."

"That's why I kept him breathing." Zhao Fan grabbed the prisoner's uninjured hand and pressed his thumb against the tactical terminal's fingerprint reader. "Now it's your job; get it done, or we all get shot full of holes in Washington."

"All right, all right! Connecting... cracking the biometric lock..."

A brief silence settled over the carriage, with only the train's roar continuing.

Evelyn watched Zhao Fan treat the wounds with a cold professionalism. He did not care about the other man's pain, only whether he was useful. He was completely different from the somewhat mysterious but reasonably mild-mannered cleaner she had met in the laboratory.

"You've changed, Zhao Fan," Evelyn suddenly said, her gaze complicated. "Or is this the real you?"

Zhao Fan stopped what he was doing and raised his head. The dim emergency light fell across the side of his face, outlining its sharp contours.

"Doctor, in this world, there's no such thing as 'real.'" Zhao Fan stood up and wiped the blood from his hands. "There are only those who survive and those who die. I simply chose to stand with the former."

He walked to one side of the carriage and looked outside through the narrow, grime-covered observation window.

The rain gradually stopped. On the eastern horizon, a faint glimmer of dawn struggled to pierce the heavy clouds.

In a few more hours, the sun would rise. And at that center of power, a storm that would change the world's balance was about to erupt. Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon... those dazzling heroes would fight evil to the death in the skies.

But that was not Zhao Fan's battlefield. His battlefield lay in the shadows.

"Boss, done!" Benjamin's excited voice broke the oppressive silence. "I hacked into their local network and used this poor bastard's clearance to lower this train's security screening level to 'minimum.' The note says 'emergency biochemical waste transfer.' Unless they want to get covered in radioactive dust, nobody's opening this door."

"Good work." The corners of Zhao Fan's mouth lifted slightly. "How long until we arrive?"

"Forty minutes. The final stop is the D.O.D.C. deep processing zone beneath the Triskelion. Which means... directly beneath S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters."

"Directly beneath..." Zhao Fan murmured.

The system's mission panel appeared before his eyes.

[S-rank mission: Throne in the Ruins]

[Objective: Recover at least one "next-generation repulsor engine core" and the "Zola Algorithm motherboard."]

[Straight-line distance to target: 65 kilometers.]

The enormous red countdown ticked away silently. It marked the time until Project Insight launched.

"Check your gear." Zhao Fan turned around, his voice low and forceful. "Old Dog, polish up your shotgun. Evelyn, stay close to me. Ben, keep communications open. You're our eyes."

He took the two disassembled energy pistols from the toolbox's hidden compartment and expertly assembled them. With a soft click, their pale blue energy gauges lit up.

"Gentlemen, lady." Zhao Fan holstered the pistols and straightened his oil-stained work clothes, a light called ambition gleaming in his eyes.

"Whether D.O.D.C. moves up another level comes down to today."

Clang-

Amid a piercing screech of scraping metal, the heavy freight train loaded with biological waste finally eased to a stop at the dedicated D.O.D.C. processing station on the edge of the district. It was less than three kilometers in a straight line from S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters-the Triskelion-with an underground waste transport pipeline connecting them directly.

"So this is the so-called 'first-class' experience?"

Inside the least conspicuous sealed carriage at the rear of the train, Dr. Evelyn Reed held her nose, her face pale. Even as a scientist accustomed to all manner of disgusting experimental samples, spending so long confined with several tons of fermenting Chitauri body parts and industrial sludge was still an enormous test of her physical limits.

"We're almost there, Doctor." By a sliver of faint light shining through a gap, Zhao Fan checked the equipment in his hands one last time. His work clothes had long since lost any trace of their original color, but that was precisely the best disguise. "If this 'garbage' giving off intense radiation and a foul stench hadn't masked our thermal signatures and heartbeats, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s helicopters would've blown us to pieces long ago."

"Besides, this smell reminds me of the pickled cabbage vats in Chinatown, though this is a little too sour." Old Dog Jose chuckled, but his grip on his shotgun was anything but relaxed, his knuckles slightly white from the force.

Benjamin Lee huddled in a corner, clutching the military laptop tightly in his arms. It was their only eyes and ears. His glasses were completely fogged over, and his whole body trembled slightly. "Boss, the network signal... is back a little. But I don't dare run a wide-area scan. The firewalls here are as thick as city walls, and network monitoring is extremely tight."

"No need to scan." Through the observation hole in the carriage wall, Zhao Fan watched squads of fully armed soldiers wearing S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia establish a lockdown outside. "We're already deep in enemy territory. Next, it's time to 'unload.'"

The carriage door was yanked open from outside.

"Move it! This batch of waste needs to reach the incinerator before the lockdown level goes up!" a foreman in a hazmat suit shouted.

But what he saw were not meek cargo handlers.

Zhao Fan shot out of the darkness like a bolt of black lightning. He used no conspicuous energy weapon, instead relying on the explosive power enhanced by the [Extremis Virus] to slam straight into the foreman's chest.

Crack.

With a faint, sharp snap, the foreman crumpled without even letting out a scream.

Immediately afterward, Kinetic Repulsion erupted, dragging two nearby patrolling soldiers into the shadows before they could react.

"Three minutes." Zhao Fan's voice was low and calm as he swiftly stripped the foreman of his hazmat suit and access card. "We need to cross the sorting area and enter the underground maintenance passage within those three minutes. Ben, did you find that access point?"

"F-found it!" Benjamin's fingers flew across the keyboard. "Right beneath the incinerator control room. There's an old data node there, a redundant backup left over from when Stark Industries laid the fiber-optic cables. I can bypass the Triskelion's external firewall and set up a temporary 'command center' right here in the processing station."

"Good." Zhao Fan looked back at Evelyn and Ben. "We'll be splitting up from here."

Evelyn's gaze sharpened. "You're going alone?"

"Not alone." Zhao Fan patted the pistol at his waist and the short Vibranium blade disguised as a utility knife. "Old Dog and I are heading to the front line. You and Ben stay here. This is a blind spot in the processing station, and someone needs to physically guard that data node. If Hydra discovers the network intrusion, they'll cut the remote connection immediately. Only someone here can maintain the signal manually."

"But..."

"No buts, Doctor." Zhao Fan cut her off, his gaze burning. "You and Ben are noncombatants. You'd only be targets up there. Your job is more important-when Old Dog and I stick that damned key up the Helicarrier's ass, I need you and Ben creating chaos for Hydra from this end."

Evelyn took a deep breath, and reason regained the upper hand. She accepted the energy pistol Zhao Fan handed her for self-defense and nodded firmly. "If you die, I'll donate your death benefits to a stray cat and dog shelter."

"Then Old Dog will definitely be grateful. The kind of grateful that makes him want to curse you out." Zhao Fan smiled.

"Let's go, Fan." Old Dog had already changed into the captured hazmat suit. Though it was a little tight, he still put on the helmet expertly, his voice coming from beneath the faceplate. "If we don't leave now, the incinerator's going to burn us as garbage too."

Like two drops of water merging into the ocean, the two silently slipped into the busy cargo-handling crew and made their way toward the magnificent Triskelion in the distance-and the three Helicarriers beside it.

[System notification]

[S-rank scenario detected: Project Insight Launch Site]

[Environmental radiation level: Extremely high (Hydra energy weapons/Helicarrier engine warm-up)]

[Mission update: Before the three Helicarriers take off and lock onto their targets, physically connect the "universal key" to the internal server of the command Helicarrier (Alpha).]