Chapter 3
The team heads to the HYDRA base as soon as Nikita gives them the coordinates. Once aboard the quinjet the Black Widow hands her an earpiece so that she can communicate with the team. Nikita sketches out a schematic of the base and all the strategic information she remembers, then Captain America lays out their battle plan. During the flight Nikita studies the people she will soon be fighting with, trying to analyze what each brings to the equation. She has never fought with a team before and wants to be prepared. She already knows what to expect from the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, their skills are legendary, tales often told by the fighters of the Bratva, lips loosening over too much vodka. She ponders Hawkeye, who also has an impressive reputation. It was primarily Hawkeye's successful career within SHIELD and his status as an Avenger, despite being a sub, that made Nikita reach out to SHIELD. She suspects that Hawkeye is not as un-bonded as his reputation would suggest. Even though they all have earpiece coms, Hawkeye is wearing a tactical throat mic on a black kevlar strap around his neck, which would be an ingenious way to camouflage a collar. Sam Wilson she has never heard of, but apparently he has flight capabilities. Captain America tasked him with providing arial support while Widow and Hawkeye download any files, leaving Nikita with the Soldier and the Captain to infiltrate the rest of the base, taking photos of any tech they find and setting charges to destroy the facility. Which leaves her the rest of the flight to ponder the Captain, who is not just a Dom, he's an Alpha Dom, easily the most Dominant person she has ever encountered.
Once the team reaches the HYDRA base they encounter heavy resistance but Widow and Hawkeye succeed in securing intel from the servers and destroying all tech and experiments they find. The fighting is fierce and the Avengers team are a little impressed with how ferociously Nikita fights. She fights primarily with a telescoping metal staff, sharpened to a wicked point at each end, and a plethora of blades strapped to every conceivable part of her body. Nikita finds it surprisingly easy to work with the Soldier and the Captain, they are skilled and efficient.
At one point, the three of them are forced to split up in order to get all of the charges placed in time. Nikita had never fought this hard for this long before. First escaping from the HYDRA base, then decimating the Volkov Bratva at the club, and now destroying a HYDRA facility, it's been a busy week. The various cuts and bruises are hidden under her black BDU pants, long sleeve black shirt, and body armor, and Nikita knows that her expression gives none of her pain and fatigue away. She's had lots of practice pretending to be stronger than she really is. The Captain's voice over the coms is calm and steady, authoritative. She finds that his voice is helping her to push past her exhaustion to accomplish the mission, something she decides bears thinking about later.
As she rounds a corner she runs into half a dozen guards in a narrow corridor, forcing her to fight them in close quarters instead of using her staff. With a knife in each hand she dives into the guards, using their numbers against them. They are not used to fighting together in any coordinated fashion and she takes advantage of that by making sure they get in each others' way as much as possible. A few minutes in she had taken down four of them and was engaging the last two. Just as Nikita drove a knife into the throat of one guard, the other managed to drive his own knife into her right side, she grabbed the knife with her right hand, keeping it in her side and spinning, wrenching it out of the guard's hand as she dropped down, driving the knife in her left hand up to the guard's groin severing his femoral artery. Nikita pulled the knife from her side, pressed a bandage from one of her pockets to the wound, then tightened the straps on her body armor, using the compression to hold it in place before continuing down the corridor.
Nikita was just placing the last of her charges in the garage where HYDRA had been keeping their vehicles when a stray guard took aim at her with a 40mm grenade. Nikita saw it coming but didn't have time get out of the way when suddenly the Captain was directly in front of her taking the impact of the grenade on his shield. Realizing that he was now facing Captain America, the guard turned to run. Nikita pulled one of the throwing knives strapped to her thigh and threw it, hitting the guard in the neck at the base of his skull, severing his spinal cord.