Author's Note: Marvel marathon with my wife in quarantine helped me get my inspiration for this story back a bit, which was nice.
I still do not take story requests or 'challenges'.
I will, as you notice be adapting some Agents of SHIELD and Inhumans material.
Chapter 17: Prisoners of the Secret War
"Masenko-Ha!" Gohan let loose a burst of energy that destroyed the last of the AIM battlemechs on site.
It appeared the location they hit had been guarded by improved versions of the Russian and Chinese Ironman knock-offs from a few years prior. Hulk-sized mechanical exoskeletons stacked with machine-guns and rpg-launchers.
More or less they had the result of a mobile one manned artillery platform. They had nowhere near the stopping power of the actual Ironman, nor the ability to fly.
Thinking back on the stories Bulma had told him he'd have likened them to some of the more advanced robotic enemies and vehicles that Pilaf or the Red Ribbon Army had thrown at his dad back before the Army had been wiped off the map.
So really a bit of a joke to a Super Saiyan but had given him a mild workout in his base form.
Thankfully they weren't anything near the Androids, Gohan thought to himself, having a great personal bias against robots, artificial intelligence, and one-hundred percent bio-mechanical fusion.
Which meant AIM hadn't completed their project. They were still looking for or developing their power source. Hopefully the computers here hadn't been completely wiped and they had hit the base fast enough to find the data.
"Knight Monkey come in," Black Widow's voice came in over his coms, needling him in a droll parody of Stark's style.
"I read you Black Widow," Gohan responded, holding back a growl, he still hadn't picked out a good superhero name yet.
"This has turned into a rescue operation we have five test subjects, quinjet evac on the way, but you need to hold off any reinforcements while we evacuate."
"I read you, I can handle that," Gohan casually used a basic burst of wind from a kiai to slam a recovering soldier into a wall and knock him out.
And honestly what sounded like a daunting task ended up being rather mundane for the half-Saiyan. First, almost every AIM weapon in the tri-state area was already littering the ground around him, and second AIM had yet to complete their experiments so there was nothing that really travelled fast enough in the same region to properly reinforce the outpost they were at.
And so when the quinjets, two of them, landed Gohan got a pretty good look at three sedated individuals being rolled onto the planes on gurneys.
It appeared that AIM had been experimenting on a black woman in her twenties, a teenaged girl of Asian descent, and another young man who appeared to be missing an eye.
Black Widow walked over to him, examining the destruction around him.
"Subtle," she stated blandly.
"It's a weird compound in the middle of the woods in Pennsylvania, and I didn't even fire off much energy I mostly punched things."
"That counts as subtle for you then," she said wryly, "Alright we need to get back to the tower. Agent Hill is going to be debriefing us and we should have the identities of the survivors by then as well."
Once they returned to Avengers Tower Agent Maria Hill held of all things, a high-tech Power-Point presentation.
"You know that the holograms can be three-dimensional right? I programmed them to do that," Tony snarked as she presented some images to the on-site Avengers.
"Irrelevant," Hill snapped back, "The rescued man with one eye is a Mutant named Urg and has been turned over to the Xavier Institute for his medical care after a short debriefing. It appears he'd been living with some underground Mutant groups and had been abducted by AIM for experimentation, likely due to his energy absorption and projection ability. The girl is a Helen Takahama who had nothing interesting about her until she disappeared, presumed dead, in the aftermath of the Chitauri attack on New York City. Her parents are certainly dead, their bodies were found. It appears AIM experimented on her as a receptacle of energy generation abilities of some kind as opposed to a source. And finally we have the most interesting case, one of our own."
Maria paused seemingly for dramatic effect and changed the slide, "Monica Rambeau, SHIELD agent, trained Air Force pilot, apparently following in the footsteps of her mother and god-mother both ace Air Force test pilots back in the 80s and 90s though the god-mother disappeared, and she was on duty when Loki overloaded the Tesseract and destroyed the SHIELD facility it was kept at. She was the lone survivor from within the blast zone and started showing strange energy shifting abilities soon after. She was abducted from a SHIELD medical facility three months ago."
The agent then waved over at Natasha, "This combined with the intelligence gathered from the site's data files suggests that they are coming close to finding a bio-mechanical energy source to fund their cyborgs. Since they cannot seem to get a reliably consistent energy generation or absorption method in a purely biological fashion due to the mutative nature of the genes they are dealing with it looks like they will begin experimenting with implants next."
Gohan's mind was rushing, thinking back to the Androids of his world, this was...not good. He looked around, Ironman could probably keep up with the older Red Ribbon models, and surely without those to build off of that's where they would have to start right? Surely AIM couldn't reach Doctor Gero's 17 and 18-series Androids' levels without decades of advancement?
But...Gohan thought in rising horror, stolen Chitauri technology could have accelerated the time table. And they'd already found some in other AIM facilities.
