SuperSoldier (SI-OC/MCU) ENG

30: Two Steps

30: Two Steps

A good strategist must always know when it's time to retreat.

Sebastian Shaw, or Klaus Schmidt as he was currently known, realized that the moment to leave Poland had arrived. It was unfortunate, as his research had yet to yield the results he expected or sought, but as a man who preferred to keep a low profile, he knew it was best to abandon ship when you could see it was about to sink.

And the Third Reich's ship was not only about to sink but also about to explode.

For others, perhaps it wasn't as clear. They thought the Third Reich still had a chance, that Hydra had a chance. But Shaw knew better: you cannot fight evolution, you cannot stop it or resist it.

Captain America and his new team of super-soldiers were evolution—perhaps not a natural evolution like the one Shaw sought, but evolution nonetheless, and something that would mark a new era for the world. and something Shaw longed to witness with his own eyes.

For those and many more reasons, he prepared to leave the concentration camp facilities in Auschwitz. If it were possible, he would have liked to stay a little longer. As one of the camp's principal scientists and a senior officer in charge, he had enjoyed considerable freedom to experiment, with all the test subjects he could ask for at hand—something he knew wouldn't be as easy to obtain elsewhere. Even so, as someone who preferred to remain in the shadows and work from the darkness, he opted not to face Captain America head-on, if it could be avoided.

He didn't fear the man or his team—Sebastian Shaw feared nothing. His power, his evolution, was superior. He was superior to everything. But making a scene by killing the "greatest hero" of this era didn't exactly fall within his definition of "discretion."

"Unfortunate," he couldn't help but murmur. He truly wanted to study his blood, to see if it was indeed something "artificial," or if, instead, the Americans had found a way to activate the hidden mutation deep within the DNA of a select few like himself. But whatever the answer, it could wait.

Everything has its time and place. Patience is not a virtue many can enjoy, but for someone who can defy the passage of time as he could, patience had become his greatest ally.

With that in mind, he thought perhaps it was time to head to the United States, take a small vacation, and relax a bit. He'd heard the nightclubs in Las Vegas were quite entertaining, and he had no shortage of money to spend on them—at least until this war ended and things calmed down a bit.

His musings were interrupted when he felt a slight tremor shake his office. It was very faint, almost imperceptible to anyone else, but not to him. Thanks to his power, he could sense that it wasn't a mere tremor; the kinetic energy behind it was more concentrated, more like a...

"Explosion?" He paused in his movements, glancing at his half-packed suitcase as different thoughts began to race through his mind.

Soon he heard the alarms blaring throughout the place, while a dozen more detonations caused the building he was in to start shaking. Distant screams and the sound of gunfire soon joined the chaos.

Shaw didn't rush. Despite the turmoil outside, his body began to move calmly once again, while in his mind he wondered how this was happening so soon.

He had heard the news, the reports. In recent days, Captain America's team had been sweeping through Poland with almost no resistance since Warsaw was liberated from Nazi occupation.

Even those "things" Hydra had begun deploying against them could barely slow their advance. Aberrant monstrosities that Shaw despised, deformities that defied nature itself. He had the chance to study some of them in recent days when Hydra brought them to Auschwitz, and everything he saw during that time repulsed him to his core.