Adamantine (Percy Jackson/Marvel)

I

Chapter 1 - Shadowing Percy Jackson

Perseus—Percy, he goes by now when he is not under a fake name—casually strolled down the street in Northern New York, his hands tucked into his pockets, his blue hood pulled low over his eyes. But not enough to restrict his view of everyone around him. His eyes swept over every stranger automatically, scrutinizing their appearance, deciding if they could be a threat to be aware of.

He noticed that a few people had just walked by him for the fourth time in the past half hour. They were never wearing the same clothes, but HYDRA had trained Percy to take note of how everyone walked, memorizing faces, skin color, eyes, height. Training him to be a perfect Soldier. Percy vividly remembered the day he escaped the HYDRA base, but could not recall his past, if he had family, if he had friends, or where he had lived.

The only thing Percy was sure of in his past was that he had been captured by HYDRA when he was twenty four. A voice in the back of his mind kept telling him it every time his mind was wiped blank by HYDRA, securing it in his mind over and over until it became normal to have a voice in his head intermittently.

Percy still looked to be around twenty four. HYDRA had preserved him over the years using cryogenics much like they did with the infamous Winter Soldier he had heard so much about.

While Percy was unsure of when exactly HYDRA had fallen with the secretive, but famous, organization known as SHIELD, he knew at that moment that was when he had to escape from their grasp because HYDRA could never stay down for long.

"Cut off one head and two more shall take its place," was their sickening motto.

A scientist that was tasked with caring for Percy and making sure he was compliant had gone a little bit soft on him over the years when he was with HYDRA. She never allowed him to skip out of the memory zapping machine when he started to remember, but she would continuously feed him instructions on how to get out of the base and survive in the modern world. And let's just say that he had a rough start. It was not bloodless. But that scientist's knowledge had proven to be profitable. Although, the scientist had only offered Percy one name when asked: Athena. Percy remembers thinking what a weird name it was, and how it sounded vaguely familiar. Like he knew someone with the same name in a different life.

A bullet zipping past Percy's ear woke him up from his trance, alerting him to how stupid he had been to allow himself to be pulled into a memory and his thoughts. Focus on the present was key to survival, and he did just that as he was forced to crouch when an agent of some kind came at him with their fist. Throwing the agent over his shoulder hard, their body hit the pavement with a loud thwack!

Another bullet was shot at him, this one Percy was able to barely dodge with his inhuman reflexes. HYDRA had made him stronger and had enhanced his mysterious control over water by experimenting on him, creating him into the super soldier he was today.

Face devoid of any emotion, he drew his gun from the hidden pocket of his blue hoodie, and turned toward the sniper. With careful precision, he pulled the trigger. Bang! The figure on the roof a few buildings away from him slumped over. Bang! The other shadow he had seen in the window of an abandoned townhouse fell backward limply, disappearing into the darkness of the room.

With an elbow to the head, he knocked out another agent, and stabbed the other two with a knife he had hidden in his boot. With a final pull of the trigger of his gun, every agent was down and unmoving.

Surveying the area, it was barren of any live humans. All of the civilians had scattered, just the dead agents were left. Hurriedly, Percy stooped down over a body, pulling out a wallet and papers from the body's pocket. Flipping through the wallet, there was nothing to show who the agents were working for. But the papers had big bold letters spelling "SHIELD" on it, though it did take Percy a couple of seconds to untangle the letters because of his dyslexia. Stuffing the letters in his pocket, he quickly turned into mist as he heard sirens traveling closer and closer to his location by the second.

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Ta da!

Love you all,

Roman Evander