No one knew exactly how much time had ticked by before the frost tornado gradually dissipated, leaving the entire fifth subterranean level transformed into a pristine, frozen wasteland.
Tony carefully assessed the icy environment around him. In fact, even the outer moving joints of his armor had been slightly jammed by the flash-freeze.
Fortunately, his suit had been engineered from day one with a highly advanced climate-control system, keeping him completely unaffected inside the shell.
Staring at the girls encased within the frost, Tony couldn't help but ask, "These girls aren't going to freeze to death, are they?"
"They won't," Peter replied, already reverted to his human form. His tone was incredibly relaxed. "They won't die anytime soon. Once we take care of Dreykov—the mastermind behind all this—I'll give them a quick treatment, and they'll be completely fine."
Tony: ...
You making it sound that easy makes me look incredibly dumb.
Once they confirmed the Red Room agents weren't in mortal danger, the trio proceeded toward the final level of the complex.
Natasha used her razor-sharp claws to effortlessly tear the reinforced iron security gate of the sixth level to shreds, only to discover that the blast doors at the very end of the corridor were already wide open.
"He didn't even run?" Natasha muttered, caught slightly off guard.
"Not only did he not run," Peter noted, a slight smile tugging at his lips after deactivating his Byakugan, "he's actually lounging quite confidently in his executive chair, casually clipping his fingernails."
Tony: ...
Why does it feel like the entire universe is populated by professional show-offs? Can someone answer me online, please? I'm in a bit of a hurry.
As the trio stepped into the office at the end of the hall, the massive executive chair in the center of the room slowly rotated around. It revealed a slightly portly, middle-aged white man sporting a textbook Receding-Hairline (Mediterranean) look—the absolute puppet master of the Red Room, Dreykov!
Dreykov meticulously clipped his nails, speaking without even bothering to lift his gaze:
"You've finally arrived."
His tone was entirely unhurried, as though he had been gracefully anticipating their arrival for hours. This dismissive, calm demeanor instantly triggered a barrage of painful, deeply suppressed memories within Natasha's mind.
Her figure blurred on instinct as she charged directly toward Dreykov.
But before she could even bridge half the distance to his desk, two shadows dropped down from the ceiling above, slamming into the floor to block her path from both the left and right.
The exact millisecond Natasha saw these two individuals, she froze dead in her tracks. The fierce, vengeful snarl on her face instantly dissolved into an expression of profound shock and emotional complexity.
Clearly, there was a deeply painful history here.
Peter looked past Natasha to observe the two women standing guard.
The one on the left possessed a striking blonde ponytail, her eyes faintly betraying a storm of heavily suppressed resentment.
The one on the right wore a form-fitting tactical suit paired with a flowing cape. Her helmet had been removed, exposing an asymmetric face—half of it smooth, pale, and flawless, while the other half was marred by catastrophic, horrific burn scars.
Because he was entirely familiar with the narrative trajectory, Peter recognized them at a single glance: Natasha's "little sister," Yelena Belova, and the "Taskmaster," Antonia Dreykov!
"Yelena..." Natasha whispered softly, her voice trembling with a raw, fragile emotion.
Yelena's lips parted slightly as if to speak, but no words came out. Her eyes didn't waver either, remaining locked in an expression of intense, programmed fury.
Dreykov was visibly ecstatic with this reaction. Delighting in the sheer torment written across Natasha's face, he spoke with an intensely punchable smirk:
"How does it feel to see your long-lost sister... and my poor daughter, whom you ruthlessly destroyed?"
Hearing those words, Natasha's entire frame shuddered. Her gaze instinctively dropped to the floor, completely lacking the courage to lock eyes with either of the two women standing before her.
If there were anyone in this world Natasha felt she owed an absolute lifetime of penance to, it was undeniably these two.
She felt she had failed Yelena, her fake little sister. When she originally escaped the clutches of the Red Room, she technically possessed the operational capability to extract Yelena alongside herself.
Except... she hadn't known back then if Yelena even remembered their shared childhood experience, let alone if Yelena still viewed her as a sister.
Thus, in her desperate bid to secure her own freedom, she chose to vanish into the night without saying a word. She pulled herself out of the abyss, leaving her little sister behind in the Red Room to endure a bleak, horrific existence of endless servitude.
As for Antonia, she was an innocent victim of the crossfire.
After escaping the Red Room, Natasha had consistently worked to dismantle the organization and free the other subjugated women. To achieve this, she had orchestrated multiple assassination plots against Dreykov. In her final, desperate strike, she had detonated Dreykov's hidden office suite.
She had no idea that his innocent young daughter, Antonia, was inside the blast radius at that exact moment. The girl was caught in the collateral damage, completely engulfed by the chemical firestorm.
For a very long time afterward, the terrified, panicked eyes of Antonia as the flames consumed her remained a permanent, harrowing nightmare in the depths of the Black Widow's psyche.
Reencountering them now, she completely lost her operational footing, her heart overflowing with an immobilizing wave of guilt. She had absolutely no idea how to proceed.
Unlike the distraught Natasha or the casually spectating Tony, Peter's psychological baseline remained entirely rock-solid. His gaze swept smoothly across the seams of the reinforced walls and ventilation shafts before finally settling back on Dreykov, the corners of his mouth tilting upward into a subtle, knowing grin.
Dreykov, whose attention was entirely monopolized by savoring Natasha's misery, failed to notice Peter's smile. At this moment, his own smirk widened into absolute triumph:
"As what I once considered my most pristine masterpiece, you have deeply disappointed me."
With a dramatic flourish, he produced a compact remote transmitter from his pocket, smoothly depressing the primary toggle button before declaring arrogantly:
"Natasha, you should never have betrayed me. And you should have certainly never come back!"
The exact split second the button clicked, the robot-like Yelena and Antonia instantly reacted to the signal. The smirk on Dreykov's face elevated from mere confidence to absolute, unchecked hubris.
He pointed a commanding finger toward the spectating Peter and Tony, shouting with tyrannical authority:
"Go! Seize them, and turn them into my puppets as well!"
The moment the command left his lips, Yelena and Antonia surged forward.
Except... the very moment they took their first step, Natasha moved like lightning, slamming her hands down onto their shoulders from either side and pinning them to the floor as effortlessly as two tiny chicks.
Huh?!
Dreykov's expression stiffened.
In utter disbelief, he furiously mashed the buttons on the remote transmitter again, barking frantically:
"Release them! Stand down and join Yelena and Antonia in—"
His sentence cut off entirely mid-breath, because he suddenly realized that Natasha's eyes hadn't changed in the slightest.
Actually, to say they hadn't changed wasn't entirely accurate. In reality, Natasha's beautiful, lupine pupils were currently filled with nothing but pure, unadulterated curiosity. She genuinely had no idea what kind of theatrical nonsense Dreykov was attempting to pull with his little plastic clicker.
For the first time since they had entered the room, an emotion called sheer panic surfaced within Dreykov's eyes:
"You... how can you possibly be unaffected?! The chemical pheromones have already been deployed into the vents! Why is the microchip inside your brain not registering the override?!"
Hearing this, Natasha tilted her head in genuine bewilderment:
"What pheromones? What microchip?"
There wasn't a single shred of acting in her voice; she was completely, fundamentally confused.
Because the original timeline had been thoroughly derailed by Peter's presence long ago, Natasha had never even known a microchip existed inside her nasal cavity, let alone that Dreykov had engineered a pheromone-based chemical trigger to remotely override the nervous systems of every Red Room agent.
"Impossible! This is absolutely impossible!" Dreykov muttered, his composure completely fracturing as he began to frantically pace behind his desk. "I personally supervised the surgical implantation of that microchip inside your nasal passage myself! How could it possibly—"
As Dreykov desperately questioned his entire reality, a casual, airy voice drifted over from the back of the room:
"Oh, that little thing?"
Peter shrugged with ultimate nonchalance. "I surgically extracted that garbage from her head ages ago."
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