Chapter 794

Felhounds were demons that fed on magic. During the War of the Ancients on Azeroth, countless Moon Guard who had grown up beneath the radiance of the Well of Eternity had fallen to these creatures’ deadly tentacles.

Hobus wasn’t nearly as powerful as the felhounds personally bred and trained by Hakkar the Houndmaster, but devouring the magical residue left behind by the Berserker Staff was well within his capabilities.

It didn’t take long.

After a final shudder of his tentacles, the air of mystical enlightenment vanished. Hobus promptly reverted to his usual husky form and dropped onto his backside, looking thoroughly satisfied with himself.

Then, to everyone’s astonishment, he raised a paw, produced a cigarette, and lit it.

He exhaled a leisurely stream of smoke.

"All done!"

Ward staggered to his feet. Without saying a word, he shuffled into a corner and hurriedly dressed himself.

The look on his face could only be described as utterly devastated.

The magical residue was completely gone. Unfortunately, his mental state had somehow managed to become even worse.

He genuinely wished the Berserker Staff had left him suffering from magical contamination instead.

Think about it. A monster the size of a young bull had pinned him to the floor from behind, while two tentacles resembling the mouths of carnivorous plants had attached themselves to his back and sucked something out of him.

Who could possibly walk away from an experience like that with their dignity intact?

Compared with what he’d just endured, the horrifying memories dredged up by the Berserker Staff seemed almost pleasant.

Could there possibly be a darker moment in his life than this one?

The others looked equally uncomfortable.

Should they go over and ask Ward how he was feeling? That seemed like a terrible idea.

Should they offer him some words of comfort?

That seemed even worse.

And what exactly were they supposed to say?

Sorry your magical therapy session involved a demon dog using you as a chew toy?

A sharp smack suddenly rang through the air.

Everyone turned just in time to see Evenson deliver a heavy slap to Hobus’s head.

"You little bastard! You’ve really outdone yourself this time!"

He grabbed the husky by the scruff and shook him vigorously.

"Stealing my money to buy dog food is one thing. But now you’re stealing my cigarettes, too? Since when did you start smoking? And what brand is that?"

Evenson took a closer look at the cigarette between Hobus’s paws.

His expression darkened.

"You’re smoking something better than I am?!"

He shook the dog even harder.

The others had seen enough.

One by one, they left the laboratory, shaking their heads and wondering how their working lives had come to this.

Simmons and Fitz were already discussing whether they should submit a request to have the entire laboratory demolished and rebuilt. They simply couldn’t imagine ever entering the room again without remembering what they’d witnessed.

Their ability to concentrate on actual scientific work had been permanently compromised.

"All right, everyone. Any new developments?"

Once the chaos had finally subsided, the team assembled in the command center. Coulson leaned forward against the central console and looked around.

Then he noticed Ward’s expression.

The agent still looked as though he’d just attended his own funeral.

"You’re back on your feet, at least," Coulson said, concern creeping into his voice. "But you look terribly pale. Take some time to recover. I don’t want you participating in the next operation."

"My physical condition is perfectly fine," Ward replied reflexively.

Then he stopped.

After a moment’s hesitation, he lowered his head.

"Understood, sir. I’ll take the time to recover."

He couldn’t imagine how he would explain the alternative.

"Actually, I found something," Skye announced.

She was already back at her workstation, once again demonstrating why SHIELD had recruited her in the first place.

"I think I’ve located an online version of that novel."

She brought up a page on the main display.

Its title read: Reborn in Asgard: The Most Badass Warrior of the Medieval Age.

"What?"

Coulson leaned toward the screen and spent several seconds examining the page.

"You’re telling me this thing actually exists online?"

He quickly pieced together what must have happened.

Evenson had initially listed a physical copy of his novel for sale. When nobody bought it, he’d apparently decided to diversify his options by uploading it to a fiction website and hoping to earn money from online subscriptions.

The sales weren’t exactly impressive.

Then again, it was difficult to call a book a commercial failure when the website hadn’t even offered the author a publishing contract.

"But if it’s available online," Coulson wondered, scratching his head, "why did Nastrond bother paying for a physical copy?"

"Supporting authors is what responsible readers do," Skye replied solemnly.

Then her expression faltered.

"Actually, that’s probably not it. Nastrond and his followers might be crazy, but they aren’t completely stupid. Who would believe the contents of a novel that the website itself wouldn’t even accept for publication?"

"Regardless, this is a significant breakthrough."

Coulson turned to her with genuine appreciation.

"Excellent work, Skye. We finally have a lead of our own. I’m confident my team can analyze this material more effectively than a bunch of religious fanatics."

He straightened.

"If we can identify the remaining clues before Nastrond does, we might find the last piece of the Berserker Staff ahead of them. That would allow us to close the net early."

The announcement visibly lifted everyone’s spirits.

Ward, in particular, seemed eager to get back into action. Finding Nastrond and his followers couldn’t happen soon enough. After everything that had happened in the catacombs, he had more than professional reasons to want them caught.

However, Skye quickly raised a problem.

"There’s one complication. Before we can extract useful clues, we’ll need to filter out the author’s fabrications. And there are tens of thousands of words of... well, moaning and grunting."

She sighed.

"Apparently, the website’s content standards aren’t very strict."

Coulson considered this.

"Fortunately, the author is right here with us."

He turned toward Evenson, a confident smile on his face.

Then the smile disappeared.

Evenson was sitting cross-legged on a couch, eyes closed, hands resting on his knees, and his posture perfectly balanced. He looked like a monk meditating on the mysteries of existence.

If the aircraft hadn’t forbidden open flames, Coulson suspected the Warlock might even have lit incense.

He lowered his voice and leaned toward Melinda.

"What’s wrong with him now? Ever since he conducted that little ritual, he’s been getting stranger by the day. Do you think he’s actually developing some kind of religious faith?"

Melinda gave him a look.

"When have you ever met a con artist who genuinely believes in his own act?"

She glanced toward the meditating Evenson.

"If you discovered that your dog was smoking better cigarettes than you, you’d probably need to find some inner peace yourself."

"Ha. Ha."

Coulson managed a couple of awkward laughs.

He honestly wasn’t sure what else to say.

Evenson never seemed to run out of ways to surprise people, and Coulson was beginning to suspect that this was a fundamental law of the universe.

"Hey. Wake up. It’s time to do some actual work."

Melinda walked over and shook his shoulder.

Evenson opened one eye.

"What?"

"Review your own novel," she said flatly. "We need to find the useful information buried in it."

"That’s all?"

He sounded genuinely offended.

"You interrupted my meditation for something so trivial?"

"Trivial?" Melinda raised an eyebrow. "Do you have anything more important to do?"

Evenson lifted his head.

"What if I told you I was communicating with a deity?"

"I wouldn’t believe you."

"Fair enough."

He sighed, unfolded his legs, and stood.

"So you found the online version of my novel. You want me to remove the inaccurate information and identify the clues that might point to the remaining pieces of the Berserker Staff."

He rubbed his chin.

"Unfortunately, I can’t help you much with that."

Skye stared at him.

"What do you mean? You wrote the book! Surely you remember which details you invented."

"First, I wrote it a long time ago."

Evenson raised one finger.

"Second, who actually remembers every detail of something they wrote ages ago? I’ve forgotten most of it."

He looked entirely unapologetic.

Apparently, the stereotype about authors having the memory of a goldfish wasn’t entirely unfounded. Once he’d moved on to another project, everything he’d written before might as well have belonged to someone else.

Fitz pressed his fingers against his forehead.

"Great. That means we’ll have to read the entire thing ourselves."

He glanced at the screen, then hesitated.

"Considering the content, especially those tens of thousands of words of moaning and grunting, I think we should leave the review to the men."

He looked at Coulson and Ward.

That made three of them, assuming Evenson wasn’t going to help.

The workload had just become considerably worse.

Skye bit her lip.

"Well, for the sake of the team, I don’t mind reviewing those sections with a critical eye..."

"No need."

Evenson pinched the bridge of his nose, his patience finally running out.

"I don’t have time for this."

Melinda’s eyes narrowed.

Having worked with him on multiple occasions, she knew that tone.

"You’re planning to stop waiting for Nastrond to lead us around and reel him in yourself, aren’t you?"

"Exactly."

Evenson smiled coldly.

"How?"

Coulson asked the question, though the answer was already starting to worry him.

"Hobus."

Evenson whistled.

The husky came trotting over.

Ward immediately flinched and took an involuntary step backward.

However, Hobus showed no sign of the terrifying demon he’d been moments earlier. He simply hopped onto the couch, sat down, crossed his legs, and took a leisurely drag on his cigarette.

The resemblance to his master was becoming difficult to ignore.

Evenson pointed at him.

"My dog has memorized the magical scent left by the Berserker Staff. All we need is a general idea of Nastrond’s current location. Give me the city they’re in, and Hobus can sniff them out."

Fitz stared at him as though he’d just proposed replacing the aircraft’s entire navigation system with a compass purchased from a gas station.

"Let me get this straight. We’re sitting inside a flying fortress packed with technology worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and we’re going to navigate our investigation using a dog’s nose?"

"As opposed to what?"

Coulson didn’t seem particularly troubled by the suggestion.

"This isn’t an ordinary dog. He was the one who found Tony Stark in the deserts of Afghanistan."

The memory of that operation was still fresh enough to be unmistakable. Coulson had personally witnessed Hobus’s extraordinary tracking ability, and he had no reason to doubt it now.

"Finding Nastrond and his followers isn’t the difficult part," Coulson continued. "SHIELD has satellites watching the world and agents operating in practically every country. We could probably arrest them quickly if we wanted to."

He glanced at the map.

"The real problem is the remaining piece of the Berserker Staff. That’s why we’ve allowed them to continue searching. If we arrest them now, we might lose our best chance of locating it."

"That’s the easy part."

Evenson sounded completely unconcerned.

"Once we have them, they’ll tell us everything."

Coulson looked at him suspiciously.

"You’re planning to use torture?"

He already had a pretty good idea of where this was going, and he didn’t like it.

"Torture is illegal. We’re SHIELD, not the CIA."

"Illegal?"

Evenson rolled his eyes.

"Go ahead. Search through every legal code in the world. Unless you start digging through medieval laws governing ecclesiastical inquisitions, I doubt you’ll find a statute that explicitly prohibits torturing souls."

Coulson froze.

For a moment, he could only stare.

Good grief. There’s actually a legal loophole for that?

The implications were horrifying. If physical torture was prohibited but the law said nothing about tormenting a person’s soul, Evenson might be able to do almost anything he wanted without technically violating a statute.

And even if someone tried to close that loophole, Evenson could probably find a way around it.

I’m not torturing them, he could claim. I’m helping them overcome their internet addiction.

"Even so," Coulson said after a moment, recovering enough to speak, "I don’t agree with this on moral grounds."

"SHIELD is concerned with the law, not morality."

Evenson straightened his jacket.

"If you have a problem with my methods, feel free to file a complaint with Nick Fury. Considering how much he looks after you, I’m sure he’ll give you a very clear answer after he finishes scheduling another dozen special interrogations with me."

Nick Fury was a good man, but he wasn’t a harmless idealist.

When dealing with captured terrorists who refused to cooperate, he wasn’t above calling Evenson for assistance. The arrangement had been used more than once. It simply wasn’t the kind of work SHIELD advertised.

Coulson stared at him for another moment, apparently reconsidering several of his life choices.

Evenson, meanwhile, was already issuing orders.

"Skye, establish Nastrond’s approximate location. Melinda, adjust our heading."

Coulson blinked.

Excuse me?

He was the highest-ranking officer on this team!

Why was Evenson suddenly giving everyone orders as though the operation belonged to him?

Ward, whose mind had finally started to recover from the Berserker Staff’s influence, was even more astonished.

Wait a minute.

He looked around the command center.

Everyone was already moving to carry out Evenson’s instructions. Nobody had questioned them. Not even Coulson had actually stopped him.

Has this entire team been under Evenson’s control from the beginning?

Had Coulson been quietly sidelined without even realizing it?

The thought was almost more disturbing than the memories Ward had been forced to relive.

After finding what they were looking for in Spain, Nastrond and his followers had wasted no time returning to their headquarters in Oslo, Norway.

Their discovery had given them a new lead, and they were now working around the clock to uncover the location of the next piece of the Berserker Staff.

They had no intention of letting another group reach it first.

Unfortunately, they were about to discover that someone else had been following their progress.

The doors to their headquarters suddenly burst open.

A black-and-white husky came charging through the entrance.

It barked loudly at the assembled followers, then turned around, wagged its tail, and sat obediently in front of the man who had followed it inside.

The newcomer wore a black trench coat. His hair was blond, and his eyes were blue.

He reached down and patted the dog on the head.

"Good job."

That was all he said.

Nastrond and his followers stared.

There were roughly a hundred people in the headquarters, and for a moment, none of them seemed to know how to react.

It wasn’t simply that someone had broken into their supposedly secure hideout.

It was the dog.

A husky had found them.

A husky.

They knew police dogs could track suspects, but since when could a fluffy, blue-eyed sled dog be trained to hunt down a group of people across international borders?

Had they really been discovered because of a dog that looked as though it belonged on a Christmas card?

The thought was so humiliating that, for several seconds, they almost forgot they were supposed to be in danger.