Their exchange ended quickly.
The fight was still going. Ajax was closing in for the kill when everything changed.
A group of strangers cut through the perimeter. Their gear was entirely yellow—sealed, like hazmat suits—with visored masks that looked built for protection rather than concealment. Their weapons were high-tech. A dozen or more of them broke the defensive ring like it wasn't there, moving to surround the Abomination with alarming coordination.
Every one of them was remarkable. Daisy watched three of them work together to pin the Abomination. Two-man pairings were enough to force Ajax and Lady Deathstrike back on their heels.
Their hardware was exceptional. Their individual combat capability was terrifying. The main force buckled under the pressure.
"Hold the line! Establish a perimeter—switch to grenade launchers!" Delta's commander kept issuing orders, but the yellow-suited figures were operating at the edge of human performance limits. A perimeter wasn't forming.
Who are these people? Whose are they?
Daisy pulled out the laptop from earlier and reopened the DoD link.
The Pentagon went quiet. Every general stared at the screen, the same thought moving through every mind: Is this SHIELD? Is this one of Weapon X's experiments?
"That is absolutely not SHIELD." Fury was the fastest to respond—and genuinely furious. An unknown hostile force had been operating inside his blind spot.
"Nor is it anything from the Weapon X program. I guarantee it." Stryker came through a beat later, and seemed to feel his word wasn't worth much by itself, so he repeated it.
Gates studied the screen with an expression that had gone carefully neutral. If it was neither of them—it was internal. He let his gaze move across the Joint Chiefs. Every one of them controlled projects, had troops at their disposal; assembling a private force wasn't complicated. So which one?
The generals looked genuinely baffled. One by one they began swearing—on God, on their parents, their wives, their children—that it had nothing to do with them.
Gates sat there watching the lot of them swear their innocence and felt, for the first time today, genuinely at a loss. If none of them were lying—where had these people come from?
Daisy had already identified them. The yellow uniforms were unmistakable: A.I.M.—Advanced Idea Mechanics. They'd once been a major arm of HYDRA, but the relationship with Baron Strucker had soured badly; they were making their move toward independence. In Marvel's gallery of faction soldiers, colors were the code: red for the Hand, yellow for A.I.M., green for HYDRA.
Outside of Extremis, she couldn't think of anything that would let three foot soldiers suppress someone who'd gone toe-to-toe with the Hulk. But A.I.M. was still deeply underground—she had nothing resembling evidence, no way to name them publicly. She kept her expression puzzled and watched.
"Can we identify these individuals?" Gates asked his technical team.
They worked frantically. The satellite had no penetrating capability; the suits were too thick to read through.
"Miss Johnson?"
The video line was still open. Gates turned to her.
She frowned, working it out. "Gamma radiation is highly penetrating. If we overdrive the satellite—run it through a rapid charge cycle to simulate some of those penetrating properties—we can force a read through the suits. The satellite will take some damage in the process. But it should work."
A satellite wasn't cheap. It also wasn't priceless. Gates approved without hesitation.
She set the parameters. The first scan came back within minutes.
Everyone in the room stared.
Every human form on screen was glowing red.
This wasn't a calibration error. The generals might not know their physics, but they had common sense.
"What temperature is that, exactly?"
"At least eighty degrees Celsius." She stopped.
On screen, one of the A.I.M. operatives suddenly erupted. His yellow suit shredded away from him in fragments—something burning outward from the inside. He screamed. Then his speed spiked. His strength spiked. Every physical metric on the display began climbing sharply.
"Ha." Stryker's voice came through the channel—dry, amused. "Your radiation enhanced him, Agent Johnson. Unconventional, I'll grant you that." He said it lightly, but behind the smirk he was already turning the idea over: the unknown internal enhancement, combined with gamma boosting—both might be worth folding into his own experiments.
The generals had no answers. On the field, the situation was reaching its conclusion.
A separate yellow-suited squad had already caught up with the detachment sent to capture the Leader. That team was gone. The Leader had been extracted.
On the main front, the A.I.M. operatives converged on the Abomination—the gamma-boosted soldier as their fulcrum—and swarmed him. Some grabbed his head, some his legs, others kept hammering. The sheer weight of it finally dragged him down.
Ajax and Lady Deathstrike were driven back to Stryker's side.
"Don't just stand there—pursue! I want these people identified and captured!" Gates wasn't going to wait to figure out whose operation this was. At his level, hesitation was worse. You established a position and you held it.
Three yellow-suited figures grabbed Blonsky and ran. The others formed a rear guard, buying distance.
Fury spoke under his breath. "Can you take one? Alive, if possible."
"Dead's fine too?"
"Prefer alive."
"Give me a moment."
She looped wide around the main force, quietly shifting into her Inhuman baseline as she moved. Above her, the military satellites swept the area—she ran through the trees, staying below their coverage angles.
She caught up with the front three.
One of you is staying.
She activated the Atomic Slicer. A thread of silver light traced level through the air, precise and instantaneous—and one foot separated cleanly from the nearest operative. The Atomic Slicer worked at the molecular level; Extremis's regeneration couldn't rebuild missing mass. The man went down without understanding what had hit him.
The other two didn't break stride. Objective first, no looking back. They kept running, the Abomination in tow.
Daisy collected her prisoner and didn't pursue further. A high-dose sedative went in. She took a long arc through the tree line and linked up with Fury, who had quietly separated from the main force.
"Serious body temperature." Fury crouched beside the unconscious operative. "Any idea what the enhancement is?"
"Hard to tell without proper analysis." She shook her head. In her own assessment, it resembled an early, imperfect version of Extremis—but not quite the finished article. An initial prototype, maybe.
They didn't rejoin Delta. A few minutes later, a Quinjet descended through the canopy, Hawkeye at the controls.
The aircraft set down at one of Fury's undisclosed secondary facilities. Agents Daisy didn't recognize took the prisoner away for bloodwork and identification.