Chapter 104
Crafting. I only had twenty-four hours. I needed to accomplish so much that my thoughts, sluggish and automaton-like until now, suddenly lurched into a chaotic sprint. Scrapper's Philosophy was not just a set of blueprints. As the description said, it was a complete philosophy. I mentally scanned my ice cave, and what had been plain junk a moment ago underwent an instant reappraisal. Conceptual Vision had activated. The wooden splinters were no longer just chips. They were a flexible composite. The coal dust was not dirt. It was a stable energy source. The ore was not stone. It was a component.
But the first and most critical task was sight. I had been blind while making the books, blind while flying through the vacuum, and blind even while hauling resources back to the cave. Enough.
The newly acquired instincts of a Scrapper Master immediately suggested two approaches.
The first was simple and fast. I could take the sand I had collected, gather it into a suspended cloud, superheat my hands with Extremis to around seventeen hundred degrees, and form two rough, cloudy, but functional glass discs. In theory, they would serve as lenses. With Scrapper's Philosophy, specifically the Material Transformation effect, their inherent flaws would be temporarily nullified. For the next twenty-four hours, those murky lenses would be as reliable as bulletproof glass and as clear as sapphire. But what would happen after those twenty-four hours, when the timer reset and I was no longer a Scrapper Master? There was a very real chance my lenses would revert to their original junk state. They would become what they had always been: two brittle, murky chunks of melted sand. I would go blind again, possibly with shards in my eye sockets, and it didn't matter that the shards wouldn't actually hurt me. No. I needed a permanent solution.
That left option two. Diamond lenses. Diamond was diamond even in a vacuum. It would hold up under any conditions; no Scrapper's magic required.
I spent the next few minutes moving around the cave, blind but considerably more confident. My hands found the pile of crystals. Conceptual Vision immediately highlighted the right one. It was a large, perfectly clear diamond. Scrapper's Philosophy was not giving me blueprints. It was giving me intuition. I did not think through the process. I simply knew it. I issued the command to the nanobots, and for the next several minutes they became my jeweler's tools. They split the crystal into two equal halves. Then, using diamond powder as an abrasive, they ground the halves with high precision, shaping them into two perfect, slightly convex lenses. I did not need a frame. Any scrapper frame made from ore or wood would fall apart within a day. I simply pressed the perfect diamond discs against my eye sockets. The nanobots instantly wove a perfect, hermetic seal, filling every gap between the diamonds and my skin. Following the same method I had tested with the Interdimensional Goggles, I injected a small amount of oxygen into the sealed space, creating a micro-atmosphere. Now I had permanent, hermetically sealed eyes. Time to open them. I opened them, and nothing happened. I could not see a thing. There was absolute, primordial darkness. Right. I was a makeshift multi-purpose engineer with diamond lenses who had, damn it, gone blind because I forgot about a light source. Ironic. Even Extremis-enhanced senses needed at least some minimal light to work with.
Next, I needed a light source. It had to work in vacuum, and it had to keep working once the skill's timer ran out. My first thought was a torch made from coal and wood splinters from the crates. But Scrapper's Philosophy immediately whispered that any open flame was impossible in this sealed, airless cave. The skill couldn't rewrite physics that far. Besides, fire was unreliable. That left crystals. They were the one constant I could rely on here. Which meant using myself again. Fortunately, this time I wouldn't need to hurt myself.
Another quick search by feel found another crystal: quartz, this time, though the skill confirmed diamond would work too. The nanobots carved a tiny hollow chamber inside it. I polished one surface until it was perfectly flat. Using that face, I attached the crystal to my forehead like a miner's third eye, and the nanobots sealed it instantly. Then I ran two carbon micro-electrodes into the hollow chamber, connecting them to my nervous system. I discharged a current mentally, simultaneously heating that spot on my forehead with Extremis. A micro-plasma arc ignited inside the crystal.
Let there be light.
And there was light. Hundreds of thousands of facets in the crystal I'd just created refracted it, flooding the cave with a steady, white, non-flickering glow. I could see.
It was a mess. That was putting it lightly. In the weightlessness of the cave, a chaotic soup of materials hung suspended in mid-air: brittle ore, wood splinters, coal dust, chunks of stone. And the most valuable of all were the crystals. My eyes instantly took in the full extent of it. Several varieties: diamonds, quartz, amethyst, emerald, even a little lazurite.
Right. My focus had to be the crystals. Scrapper's Philosophy was a cheat code, but a temporary one. Whatever I built from the ore or wood would lose its conceptual properties in twenty-four hours and most likely revert to its junk state. The crystals, though, were different. A diamond had been a diamond before the skill. Quartz had been quartz. Scrapper's Philosophy had simply let me work them with impossible precision. These materials were stable. They would hold. At least the probability of that was above eighty percent by my rough, very rough, completely unscientific estimates. There was always the chance I was missing something.
All right. Time to set aside stray thoughts. I had vision, I had light, and Conceptual Vision was active. Now I needed to decide what to craft. I only had twenty-four hours. I needed to create things that would still be useful later, after this cheat skill disappeared and something new took its place.
Ideally, I should also make something useful in the present. The atmosphere problem in the cave was still beyond me. There was nothing to work with. The communication problem was also impossible to solve. Actually, wait. I could. Scrapper's Philosophy was practically whispering that I could assemble a radio from these quartz and ore. It would take a few hours, but it was possible. No. Definitely not.
I shut that thought down. Even if I somehow assembled a transmitter powerful enough to punch a signal through this void and catch some cosmic frequency, assuming something as primitive as radio existed in a highly advanced interstellar civilization at all, then what? I was unlikely to stumble across the Guardians of the Galaxy on a good day.
This was the Marvel cosmos. The odds of running into the Kree equivalent of space Gestapo, slave traders, or plain pirates were astronomically higher than encountering anyone from the Nova Corps. Besides, there were millions upon millions of kilometers of empty space. How powerful would a homebrew radio need to be? Guarantee of effectiveness or not? radio and the search for alien life were scrapped. I would count only on myself.
That mental argument settled, I got to work crafting permanent tools. No brittle metal from ore would work. Scrapper's Philosophy would have upgraded it, but in twenty-four hours it would become ore again. I needed things that were durable to begin with. I had tons of carbon in the form of coal and wood chips, and diamonds.
Conceptual Vision showed me how. I did not cut. I sintered. Using Extremis as a thermal press and the nanobots as a mold, I created monolithic, ultra-hard tools from polycrystalline diamond. Hammers. Pickaxes. Chisels. They were tools immune to the vacuum, even after decades. If tomorrow brought some new crafting skill requiring tools, something like a Master Blacksmith, I would already have a basic set ready.
For good measure, I also made several diamond knives and surgical scalpels, as well as a mortar and pestle. I carved the mortar from a solid stone block, but Scrapper's Philosophy prompted me to reinforce it. I filled all the brittle pores with a carbon dust composite. The pestle was, naturally, solid diamond. Why did I need a mortar? Order. I wanted order in this chaos.
For better or worse, all of that took me less than three hours. The Scrapper's Philosophy skill made the process intuitive and unsettlingly fast. Then I simply didn't know what else to make.
The skill didn't grant advanced engineering knowledge. It was, literally, just improvised assembly of basic items. Weapons? I had Extremis. Even an improvised weapon, no matter how effective it was guaranteed to be, couldn't match the plasma discharge from my own hands. I'd already dismissed the idea of communicating with the outside world. A way back to Earth was beyond Scrapper's Philosophy. It was just an Uncommon skill, after all.
So I concluded that the best use of my remaining hours was organizing the chaos. I needed to sort the drifting debris and secure it in place.
I began creating shelves. Using Extremis as a thermal cutter, I melted deep recesses, compartments, and ledges directly into the cave's ice walls. I made dozens. Then I cut flat ice slabs to fit precisely over the recesses. They would serve as lids. Later they would simply be frozen shut, hermetically sealing the resources inside.
Then I moved on to collecting and sorting. I fashioned something like a large bucket from compressed wood chips. It was ungainly, square, and clearly impossible under normal conditions, but Material Transformation held it together. With it, I began scooping up clouds of fine debris.
I gathered larger pieces, ore, crystals, and coal by hand, slotting them into the ice recesses and sealing them immediately. I scooped the fine debris into the bucket, transferred it to my mortar, and ground it to uniform powder with the diamond pestle. Then I used Extremis to compress the powder into briquettes and placed them in their own dedicated recesses.
It was long, monotonous, meditative work. Hour after hour.
At the end of the twenty-fourth hour, the timer reset. Scrapper's Philosophy vanished. I felt it like a click in my mind. Conceptual Vision was gone. The debris was just debris again. Predictably, the bucket in my hands disintegrated. Guarantee of Reliability apparently had no residual effect at all. That was fine.
I was satisfied with myself regardless, so I took a look around the cave. My diamond third eye bathed it in light. The result wasn't perfect, but it was in order. I wasn't in chaos anymore. I was in a clean, organized den. Not all of the debris had been cleared, but clearing over ninety percent of it was more than respectable. Now I had near-permanent diamond tools. All the resources were sorted, ground where needed, and securely sealed into the walls. I was fully prepared for whatever the new day brought.
In high spirits, feeling like the master of my ice fortress, I opened the System and clicked on Daily World Forging.
Why did I even bother?
That was my first reaction upon seeing what had dropped.
Super-soldiers. How much pain and trouble those two simple words held.
Every time he looked in the mirror, Fury thought of Isaiah Bradley. Bradley had been a proud Black soldier and one of the first surviving test subjects, receiving an experimental, incomplete, and severely weakened version of Erskine's serum. Yet he had created considerable trouble in his time. It was a very unpleasant kind of noise for those in power, unpleasant enough that all records related to the Bradley Program had been classified permanently, or so it seemed.
But few knew that in the postwar years, so many variations of the serum had been derived from Isaiah's blood that untangling the full picture was a nightmare. Fury had untangled it. His position required it. More than that, seven years ago he had injected himself with one of the more-or-less stable late-era variants. It made
him stronger than Romanoff, though considerably weaker
from Shostakov.
He was a weak super-soldier. Nothing compared to the Red Skull, for instance. Nothing compared to the now-missing Thompson, who had seemed to be something else entirely. And certainly nothing compared to Rogers.
The perfect super-soldier. Project Rebirth. Fury had studied the archives exhaustively, steeling himself for this day. A number of scientists who subsequently analyzed the remnants of Erskine's serum had reasonably concluded that producing a Rogers equivalent required Rogers himself as a template. More precisely, it required a recipient whose moral qualities and unbreakable will would be amplified many times over by the serum.
The military had dismissed that theory as nonsense, of course. They wanted a weapon, not a hero. Fury, on the other hand, thought there was a kernel of truth to it. And the best proof of that, alive, breathing, and newly awake, was behind the door in front of him right now.
"Turn off the surveillance," Rogers said calmly, already on his feet. His voice, amplified through the old speaker, was level and steady. "And stop preparing the sedatives behind the door."
Fury glanced at them. A few doctors were indeed standing nearby with syringes at the ready, strictly as a contingency. It appeared, however, that they were unnecessary.
Fury turned off the tablet, which still displayed the room, and handed it to one of the assistants.
"Stand down, everyone. Pull the surveillance." He nodded toward the camera above the door, then walked in.
That small gesture of respect for Steve's capabilities showed that Fury was already working through how Rogers had known. How far did his abilities extend? What exactly were they?
"Sixth Intervention Tactical-Operational Logistics Division," Fury said as he came into view. "Also known as S.H.I.E.L.D. You may know us by a previous name: the Strategic Scientific Reserve."
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s predecessor. The Allied agency created to fight Hydra. And the one that had, in a sense, created Rogers.
Rogers was silent. He wasn't looking at Fury's uniform or coat. He was looking at his face, studying it. He was probably surprised, at the very least, by the fact that the first person he met was Black. Rogers had not been a racist. Numerous testimonies confirmed that. But the situation was unfamiliar to him.
And at that moment, Fury understood. He understood that Rogers had sensed the surveillance and the doctors behind the wall. His senses weren't merely enhanced; they were razor-sharp. He could hear the electrical hum of the cameras, the accelerated heartbeats of the doctors through the wall. He could catch micro-expressions in an instant, something that no human could consciously control. Then there was the empathy, naturally amplified by the serum. That couldn't be underestimated either. It was one of the reasons Erskine had chosen him. Rogers was a perfect, living lie detector.
"Lying to you is pointless," Fury said. It wasn't a courtesy. It was a statement of fact. "So I'll be direct. You were in the ice for seventy years. It's 2015. Welcome back."
"Seventy years," Rogers murmured, stunned. His mind refused to accept it. But every sense he had, the smell of sterile air, the sound of the digital radio, the sight of Fury's face, told him it was true. "Peggy, Bucky, the guys. How did this even happen?"
"Fury. Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.," Fury said, extending his hand. "Good to meet you, Steve. As for how, I already told you. The ice."
Truthfully, Fury was impressed. He noted with some surprise that Rogers was remarkably composed. It wasn't what you'd expect from a veteran who'd just learned that everything he'd fought for was gone, everything he'd fought to preserve, distorted beyond recognition.
That was precisely what Fury intended to work with. He would isolate Rogers from his old ideals. He would redirect his loyalty to a blank slate. He would position himself as the only guide through this new, dishonest, gray world. Fury didn't need to break Cap. He just needed to persuade him. He needed to show him that S.H.I.E.L.D. was the only home for a man like Steve.
Recruitment through truth. Positioning S.H.I.E.L.D. as the heir to the SSR. Planting doubt about what America had become. And, of course, the ace up his sleeve wasn't an offer of enlistment, but of rehabilitation. The primary lever in that rehabilitation would be Bucky Barnes, who had already begun his first memory restoration session under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s best specialists.
In the end, Fury would give Rogers a choice and a little time. He would leave him alone with his thoughts and a tablet with internet access. Rogers was intelligent. He would figure it out. His instincts and empathy would work against him in this new world. Only within S.H.I.E.L.D., or so Steve would come to believe, would he be able to trust them.
Yes, the plan was good. On paper. Mental paper. How it would play out in practice was another matter. This was going to be a long, very long conversation.
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