Harry felt his head buzz as his thoughts instantly turned into a tangled mess.
He remembered the image of Captain America from the news and from all sorts of promotional material when he was a child: a superhero who symbolized justice, courage, and never backing down.
No matter how hard he tried, he simply could not connect that shining image to the Captain Hydra Fury was describing.
"That's impossible... he's Captain America. He's been through so much. He fought alongside the Avengers against so many powerful enemies. How could he suddenly turn into this?
Could there be some kind of misunderstanding? Maybe he was controlled, or maybe someone is impersonating him?" Harry threw out one possibility after another.
Nick Fury shut every one of them down again, his tone heavy.
"We wanted that to be true too. But every sign says this is his own will.
"His actions and his words both show that he has completely gone over to Hydra.
"He knows a great deal about S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers. Now he's using all of that against us, and it's caused no small amount of trouble."
Harry fell silent again. He still could not believe it. Unless Steve had been affected by mental magic, there was no way he would ever willingly side with evil.
Which meant there had to be something else going on.
So Harry asked, "Where are you? Let's talk face-to-face. There has to be more to this."
"I'm with Coulson and the others at a secret base in New York. You should know where it is."
...
Contrary to what Nick Fury assumed, Harry did not actually know the exact location of the secret base.
Still, for the Harry of today, using a variety of detection spells to search all of New York was hardly any trouble.
A few minutes later, inside a hidden room, golden magical light suddenly flashed and a portal opened in midair.
Harry looked around and found himself inside a decommissioned base. Even the S.H.I.E.L.D. emblem hanging on the wall had faded and rusted with age.
After a brief glance around the room, Harry turned toward Nick Fury, who was slowly walking over, and said in a low voice, "Looks like your situation is even worse than I thought. You don't even dare use one of the better military bases."
Nick Fury tugged at the bandages beneath his eyepatch, the metal prosthetic eye beneath it glinting coldly in the dim light.
His body was wrapped in bandages, some of them still bleeding. The whole room reeked of blood and rust.
Fury sat down on a stool, pulled out a map, and spread it across the table, his expression ugly.
"Hydra has infiltrated every Level Three facility and above. Right now, even orbital satellite coverage is full of their eyes.
"You think I want to hole up in a place like this? Three hours ago, in a conference room beneath the Pentagon, every coffee cup at the table was laced with neurotoxin. Everyone's... except our good friend Steve.
"If Coulson and the others hadn't risked their lives to get me out, and if your magic hadn't helped, I'd be dead already.
"I trusted Steve too much before. He knew too much. So when even he betrayed us, we were left completely on the back foot.
"If I hadn't made a habit of keeping contingencies in reserve, we probably wouldn't even be able to stay in this half-collapsed military dump."
Harry raised an eyebrow, drew his wand, pointed it at Nick Fury, and said softly, "Reparo."
Under the influence of time magic, Fury's injuries rapidly reversed.
Once Fury had recovered, Harry turned and cast the spell on Coulson and the others as well. The most seriously injured among them was not Fury, but Barton.
One of his eyes had been completely destroyed. If Harry had not been here, Hawkeye would have had to spend the rest of his life as One-Eye.
Was that some kind of S.H.I.E.L.D. destiny?
At this rate, Barton had a real shot at inheriting Fury's position.
Only after restoring Nick Fury, Barton, Coulson, and Black Widow did Harry continue, "Fury, with your personality, I'm guessing you recorded it.
"Show me the footage from the scene. Maybe there's a clue in it."
Nick Fury nodded and pulled out a silver device about the size of a walnut from a hidden pocket in his tactical vest.
The metal shell was still smeared with dark red blood. He tossed it casually, and the device spun rapidly across the surface of the conference table.
The next second, an ultra-clear holographic projection shot into the air, and the conference room three hundred meters beneath the Pentagon floated above their heads.
At first, the footage showed an entirely ordinary meeting. Steve Rogers was there too, rubbing the edge of his shield with his thumb, looking exactly like the reassuring leader everyone trusted.
Then a server walked in and placed a cup of coffee in front of every person at the table.
After everyone drank, nothing seemed wrong at first. But the moment Nick Fury took his last sip, Steve suddenly stood up and grinned viciously.
"A bunch of idiots. You finally took the bait. At last, I don't have to keep pretending to be the good guy anymore!
"Today is the day S.H.I.E.L.D. dies, and the celebration of Hydra's return to this world!
"Now it's time to show the world what true order looks like. Hail Hydra!"
As he said that, he yanked open his collar. A Hydra brand on his chest rose and fell with his breathing, forming a warped reflection against the projected stars and stripes on the wall.
What followed was Nick Fury's furious demand for answers and a chaos of flashing magical beams.
Then Harry tapped the table and instantly froze the space-time in front of him, halting the projection on a single frame.
In that frame, a huge amount of scarlet ooze was suddenly pouring out of Steve's body. It spread over him like a web, rapidly weaving itself into a living suit.
The moment the symbiote completely covered him, spikes and claws burst out from the living armor like a thicket of thorns.
By the end of the transformation, a two-meter-tall monster stood there in his place.
Scarlet lines glowed across his chest, twisting together with the shredded remnants of the stars and stripes into a serpent-like Hydra pattern over the black surface of his body.
More importantly, eight heads had grown from his back, each one belonging to a Steve from a different age. Together with his original head, there were nine in total, perfectly matching Hydra's symbolism.
Harry stared at the frozen image without blinking. After thinking for a moment, he finally remembered what kind of creature this was.
A symbiote, a special parasitic lifeform created by Knull, the god of symbiotes.
On their own, symbiotes were liquid or semi-liquid organisms and were actually quite weak. Even a human child could kill one with fire.
But once they bonded with a host, they became terrifyingly powerful.
As for Knull himself, he was a multiversal-level entity, a being who had once decapitated a universal-scale Celestial with a single strike.
That severed head now drifted through space and was known as Knowhere.
The instant Harry recognized the symbiote, a thought occurred to him. Could Steve's betrayal be connected to Knull?
If that were really the case, then Harry was going to have a very serious talk with Knull.
But very quickly, he rejected that theory, because he noticed the eight heads behind Steve.
Those ashen faces were frozen in expressions of terror, and the torn muscle at the base of the severed necks was still twitching faintly. They were not an illusion created by the symbiote at all. They were real heads, taken from Steves of different ages.
Which meant this Steve had killed at least eight versions of himself from parallel universes.
He was not the Steve of this universe at all.
He was from another universe.
Harry shared that conclusion with everyone present, but for some reason, none of them were paying attention to his explanation. Instead, they were staring fixedly at the fingers he had resting on the table and at the frozen projection.
Tilting his head, Harry swept his amber eyes across the room and asked in confusion, "What? Is there a problem? This really isn't the time to play freeze tag."
Natasha lifted a finger and pointed at the suspended projection, her face full of shock.
"Wait. Just to pause it, you stopped its time?"
Harry had no idea why she sounded so stunned, but he still answered patiently, "Yeah. For a wizard, using magic to make life more convenient is pretty normal, isn't it?"
The others were instantly left speechless.
If it had been some other kind of magic, fine. But this was time magic.
Since when was time something you could casually manipulate?
Then again... for Harry, it really did seem to be exactly that.
At that thought, Barton's eyes lit up and he immediately proposed, "If Harry's that strong, then why are we even wasting time discussing right and wrong? We should just crush them head-on with overwhelming force. It's the simplest and most foolproof plan."
Noticing everyone look toward him, Harry shrugged helplessly.
"This sudden Hydra uprising probably isn't limited to our universe. There may be enemies from other universes involved too.
"And you all know what my power is like. My lower limit and upper limit fluctuate a lot. If something on the level of a Skyfather shows up, I'm in trouble too."
In his normal state, Harry was only below Skyfather tier. He could not actually beat one.
If he needed to defeat an enemy on that level, he would have to overdraw his magic.
And the magical power inside him had been growing more and more. He did not know the exact amount, but compared to where it had been when the Ancient One retired, it had multiplied several times over again. Harry genuinely feared that if he lost control, he might accidentally destroy this universe.
At that point, compared to any Skyfather-level villain, he would be the true nightmare of the world.
Hearing that explanation, the others all nodded deeply and agreed that they needed to handle this carefully.
The odds were slim, but they still knew perfectly well which was more serious: a planetary crisis, or a catastrophic event that could destroy an entire universe.
Just then, Harry suddenly asked, "By the way, you didn't contact Tony? If he helps, our investigation will go much faster."
Nick Fury shook his head.
"No. We didn't contact Tony. If even Steve can betray us, then a playboy like Tony is even less of a sure bet.
"You're different. You could never betray us. On that point, we trust you completely."
The other agents nodded deeply as well. Harry would never betray them.
Because if even Harry became a supervillain, then this would stop being merely a crisis for Earth.
It would become a crisis for the multiverse.
And at that point, faced with an absolute gap in power, all they could do was lie down and wait to die.
Harry thought for a moment, then said, "Steve still has my Lending contract on him. According to the contract's feedback, he should still be alive.
"I'm going to try using the Lending contract to contact him and see if I can confirm his condition."
To Harry's surprise, the contract encountered absolutely no resistance and established a connection with Steve at once.
But the words that came back made Harry's face go dark, because all he heard was Steve roaring like a madman:
"Hail Hydra! Hail Hydra! Hail Hydra!"
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