It only took a few more weeks to wipe out the last Hydra cells.
Once Schmidt was gone and their central command shattered, the organization collapsed in on itself. Without their messianic figurehead and without the Tesseract to rally around, Hydra fractured into paranoid remnants—cells turning on each other, hoarding scraps of anomalous tech they no longer understood. The Foundation moved in methodically. Cleanly. Efficiently.
No theatrics. No mercy.
By the end of it, Hydra was finished—not dormant, not hiding, but gone. What remained were files, corpses, and containment crates.
And for the first time in years, my desk began to clear.
With Hydra eradicated, Foundation resources shifted almost entirely toward stopping Hitler and the Nazi regime from uncovering or exploiting anomalous items. Compared to Hydra, it was… simpler. Still dangerous—any regime obsessed with power always is—but fundamentally different.
The Nazis sought anomalies as weapons.
Hydra sought them as faith.
Hydra understood the supernatural, respected it in their own twisted way, and pushed it to terrifying extremes. Rituals. Demon pacts. Reality-bending experimentation. They weren't just digging up artifacts—they were trying to become something more than human.
Hitler, by comparison, was crude.
Obsessive. Brutal. Loud.
He lacked Hydra's finesse, their deep occult infrastructure, their willingness to burn entire worlds for power. Without Hydra guiding and accelerating his efforts, his progress slowed to a crawl. Most of what the Nazis uncovered now was intercepted, sabotaged, or quietly relocated before it ever became a problem.
And because of that, my workload dropped dramatically.
No more daily emergency briefings.No more simultaneous multi-site containment breaches.No more signing off on mass-casualty reports every few hours.
I still worked—of course I did—but the pressure was gone. The constant sense that the world was one bad decision away from collapse finally eased.
Hydra had been the real threat.
Not because they were evil—that was common enough—but because they were competent. Visionary. Willing to pay any price.
With them gone, the war felt… manageable.
Temporary calm, I knew. Something always followed.
But for now, the serpent was dead, its head severed, its body burned to ash—and for the first time in a long while, the Foundation was finally ahead of the curve.