Chapter 590

From the outside, the pyramid looked small enough.

That meant the inside couldn’t be very large either.

After making his way through a narrow passage, Evenson entered the main chamber.

And...

Well.

If this really was the altar of some ancient god, then that god had gotten the short end of the stick.

The chamber wasn’t even as large as Evenson’s basement.

At the center of the room, directly opposite the entrance, a fairly large mural covered roughly a third of the wall.

The image itself was nothing more than a collection of lines of varying thickness. They looked almost as though someone had sketched them without giving much thought to symmetry or composition.

The result was difficult to interpret and somehow unsettling to look at.

Near the mural’s lower-left corner sat something that looked completely out of place.

A silver rectangular device with an unmistakably modern design had been embedded halfway into the wall.

That had to be the 0-8-4 S.H.I.E.L.D. was looking for.

The rest of the walls were covered in strange symbols that resembled writing.

Evenson took one glance at them and immediately understood why the archaeology professor outside had been unable to make sense of them.

The poor man could spend another hundred years studying them and get nowhere.

Because they were meaningless.

Someone had essentially scribbled nonsense across the walls.

But that nonsense served a purpose.

It concealed the real message.

The true record left behind in this temple was hidden among the fake characters.

Magic runes.

Evenson wasn’t sure whether the person who had carved them possessed magical power, or whether the truth they recorded was so deeply infused with myth that it had transformed into something more than ordinary writing.

Either way, the result was the same.

Evenson could read them.

He didn’t recognize the writing itself, but as a Warlock, he understood the principle behind magical runes.

The written symbols were only a medium.

What mattered was the will embedded within them.

Unfortunately, deciphering these runes was far from easy.

First, he had to separate the genuine runes from the meaningless symbols surrounding them.

Then there was the structure—or lack thereof.

Whoever had created them had apparently been either deranged or simply unconcerned with orderly presentation. The runes were scattered without any obvious sequence, with fragments appearing in random places.

Reconstructing the message was already difficult.

Time had made it worse.

The temple was at least a thousand years old. Natural erosion and damage caused by animals had destroyed portions of the inscriptions.

Once a symbol was damaged, the will contained within it faded as well.

That left Evenson trying to reconstruct an ancient magical message from fragments of something that no longer fully existed.

Meanwhile, S.H.I.E.L.D. was far more interested in the 0-8-4.

"This thing’s appearance and manufacturing technique suggest German engineering."

Fitz had deployed a small drone and was using it to scan the object from every angle.

Simmons added, "But it’s embedded in a fossilized layer, which means it has to have been there for at least fifteen hundred years."

She frowned.

"That’s actually a thousand years older than the pyramid itself."

"I don’t suppose you two could—"

Evenson paused.

"How old did you say this place was?"

Trying to decipher damaged magical runes was hard enough without two scientists talking beside him and constantly disrupting his concentration.

He’d been about to tell them to keep quiet.

Then Simmons’s last sentence registered.

"Fifteen hundred years."

She blinked.

For a moment, she looked worried that she’d made some mistake and that the Avenger was about to point it out.

"The walls we examined are at least fifteen hundred years old," she clarified carefully. "That’s only an initial estimate. They could be older."

She pointed vaguely toward the entrance.

"But I’m certain the pyramid itself is only around five hundred years old. It appears to be one of the final structures built during the Inca Empire."

"So the walls and mural came first."

Evenson’s eyes narrowed.

Then the pyramid was built afterward.

That strengthened his earlier suspicion.

The pyramid hadn’t been built to worship whatever was inside.

It had been built to hide it.

The inscriptions had existed long before the pyramid.

At some point, the people who built the pyramid must have discovered this place and uncovered whatever truth had been recorded here.

Perhaps what they found was blasphemous.

Perhaps it revealed something terrifying.

Whatever the reason, they hadn’t dared destroy it.

Instead, they had constructed a pyramid over the site, effectively sealing it away and hiding its existence.

And during the Inca Empire, a pyramid wasn’t some tourist attraction.

Entering a sacred structure involved ceremonies, religious authority, and enormous effort. Even kings and priests wouldn’t casually wander into places like this.

A small, isolated pyramid hidden deep in the jungle was practically the perfect way to bury a secret.

"I... did I say something wrong?"

Simmons looked increasingly nervous.

Evenson barely glanced at her.

"Mhm."

He continued staring at the wall.

"Nothing wrong with your numbers."

"Really?"

Her voice suddenly brightened.

Her eyes lit up.

"So this 0-8-4 is at least fifteen hundred years old?"

She sounded genuinely excited.

"Could it be a relic from an ancient civilization? Or perhaps something left behind by extraterrestrials who visited Earth in antiquity?"

Evenson slowly turned to look at her.

He gave her the same expression a concerned doctor might give a patient who had just said something profoundly worrying.

"How does your brain even get from point A to point Z like that?"

He walked over to the wall.

Then he pressed his palm against the ancient stone.

"Look."

He raised an eyebrow.

"My hand is resting on a fifteen-hundred-year-old fossil layer."

He looked at Simmons.

"Does that make me fifteen hundred years old?"

"Uh..."

Simmons flushed.

She’d gotten carried away.

The wall being fifteen hundred years old didn’t mean the object embedded in it had necessarily been there since the beginning.

It could have been installed much later.

"So, any other questions?"

Evenson sounded increasingly impatient.

Simmons shook her head.

"Good."

He turned back toward the wall.

"Then please keep the volume down. I’m thinking."

"I have a question."

Coulson’s voice cut through the room.

Evenson turned.

Coulson looked thoroughly unimpressed.

"When did you become such an expert on Inca history?"

He gestured toward the walls.

"Look, it’s your personal hobby. I don’t care. Once we’re done here, I can put you in touch with a few university professors who specialize in Inca history. You can sit around discussing this stuff with them for three days and three nights if you want."

His expression hardened.

"But right now, could you please remember that we came here for a mission?"

Coulson had been irritated for a while.

They hadn’t traveled all the way to Peru to go sightseeing.

Yet since entering the pyramid, Evenson had spent most of his time staring at the mysterious inscriptions. He’d barely looked at the 0-8-4.

From Coulson’s perspective, that was the very definition of getting distracted.

"Fine, fine."

Evenson scratched his head.

He knew that if he didn’t finish the actual mission, he’d never get a chance to properly study the place.

"You people have spent all this time examining the device and still haven’t figured it out. That’s honestly impressive."

He turned toward the 0-8-4.

"But I can tell you exactly what it is."

Coulson’s attention sharpened.

"It’s an energy-storage device."

He paused.

"Unfortunately, it isn’t a battery."

Evenson looked at the object.

"What’s stored inside is energy from the Tesseract."

The room went quiet.

"I could sense it the moment I got close."

Coulson’s expression changed immediately.

"The Tesseract?"

He stared at the device.

"Are you certain?"

"Completely."

Evenson nodded.

"I used to be..."

He caught himself.

Simmons and Fitz were nearby.

He reconsidered his wording.

"I’m a consultant on that project."

That was close enough to the truth.

"Unfortunately, the project exploded before I was officially brought in."

He shrugged.

"But I was nearby when the Tesseract released enough energy over New York to open that portal. I’ve felt its energy signature before."

His expression turned serious.

"I couldn’t mistake it."

Coulson stared at the 0-8-4.

Then the pieces began falling into place.

"So..."

He approached the device.

"What exactly is this?"

His eyes widened slightly.

Evenson beat him to the answer.

"Fitz said it was made using precision German engineering."

He nodded slowly.

"So what does that suggest?"

"World War II."

"Hydra."

"Captain America."

"And the Red Skull."

Coulson’s expression hardened.

"This is a Tesseract weapon built by Hydra."

It made sense.

The Red Skull had been the first to uncover the Tesseract and had used its power to develop a new generation of weapons.

He’d intended to use them to conquer the world.

Captain America had stopped him.

Hydra’s weapons were later confiscated and destroyed.

Or at least the ones anyone knew about.

The Red Skull had been developing all kinds of experimental technology, and nobody could say for certain how many weapons he’d created or where all of them had gone.

As for why one had ended up in Peru?

That wasn’t difficult to explain.

After World War II, plenty of Nazi fugitives escaped to South America.

In the 1970s, for example, authorities in rural Argentina eventually discovered that three seemingly ordinary men—a brewery owner, a pig farmer, and a tailor—had all actually been former members of the SS involved in running concentration camps.

There was no shortage of war criminals who had slipped through the net and disappeared into South America.

Finding a Hydra member among them wasn’t exactly unbelievable.

Then shouting and gunfire erupted outside.

Coulson immediately turned and hurried toward the entrance.

Melinda and Ward had been guarding the perimeter when they’d noticed several people lurking in the jungle and watching the site.

They had moved to intercept them.

Unfortunately, the people they’d subdued weren’t alone.

Their reinforcements had quickly surrounded Melinda and Ward.

And judging by the uniforms, they appeared to be soldiers from the Peruvian military.

Coulson stepped forward and displayed his credentials.

"We’re agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Lower your weapons."

A Jeep approached.

A woman in her thirties stepped out.

She was striking, with distinctly Latin American features, and clearly carried enough authority to be in command of the soldiers surrounding them.

The moment she saw Coulson, surprise crossed her face.

"Coulson?"

"Camila?"

Apparently, they knew each other.

Very well, judging by what happened next.

The woman stepped forward, wrapped her arms around Coulson, and kissed him.

Not exactly the sort of greeting you gave an old acquaintance.

There was history there.

Melinda stood nearby and watched.

Her teeth practically ground together.

The faint green tinge at the tips of her hair suddenly seemed to be spreading upward.

A lot.

...