Chapter 127 - Diplomatic Amputation

Chapter 127: Chapter 127 - Diplomatic Amputation

Duskreaver turned once above T’Chaka, its crescent head cutting a slow black circle through the night.

Lucius carried the immense weapon one-handed as he crossed the torn lawn. Crimson light moved through its runes, and the weight that should have dragged the axe toward the earth did not slow him.

"All that advanced technology," he said. "The only supply of Vibranium on the planet, generations of hidden genius, and what did your people build for the occasion? Spears."

His smile widened.

"Very expensive spears, I assume. That should comfort the dead dogs."

T’Chaka kept his back against the broken wall. The Panther suit still held its shape, although each breath moved broken ribs beneath it and his right arm no longer answered. One knee had been destroyed. His left foot remained planted because allowing Noctis to see him collapse felt like the last defeat still within his power to refuse.

Twelve War Dogs had crossed the estate wall with him. The two flanking teams had vanished to silent rifle fire before the centre reached the mansion. Two more lay with bullets through their eyes. The last pair had continued fighting after losing hands, blood, and any reasonable chance of survival.

They had trusted their king to judge the risk, and Noctis had broken that judgment apart in minutes. He had done it at arm’s length, treating Wakanda’s finest metal as poor workmanship and centuries of combat training as a diversion before breakfast.

Duskreaver descended into another idle turn.

"Tell me, bad doggy," Lucius continued. "Which arm should I start with?"

T’Chaka forced air through his teeth and gave the insult no answer.

"Thief."

"Give me the formula for the potions you sell." T’Chaka’s voice roughened beneath the mask, but it did not break. "No foreign trick can be beyond Wakandan technology. It can not be allowed."

Lucius looked at him for a moment, almost patiently.

Then he let the suspended swing finish.

The crescent edge fell through the Panther suit above T’Chaka’s broken right arm. Vibranium weave, flesh, and bone offered different sounds but no meaningful delay. The severed limb struck the grass while Duskreaver buried its lower curve in the earth.

Pain erased the wall, the lawn, and the waiting rifles. T’Chaka heard his own breath tear loose inside the mask. He refused to give the foreigner anything louder.

The axe rose cleanly. A force he could not see closed around the ruined shoulder, hard enough to slow the blood without granting relief.

"Now, now," Lucius murmured. "You ignored my question and accused me of stealing from a joke of a country. That is poor diplomacy, even for a monarch in a kinky cat suit."

T’Chaka turned the mask toward him.

"Wakanda is not a joke."

"Of course not. Jokes are meant to be shared. Wakanda hid behind a curtain, told itself everyone outside was primitive, and became so advanced that its king travelled personally to kidnap a potion maker."

Lucius braced Duskreaver across one shoulder. The Uru edge rested beside his head as naturally as another man might carry a walking stick.

"Your scientists could not reproduce my work, so you decided it had to be yours. Your soldiers warned you about the estate, yet you brought them anyway. Now they are dead, you are on my lawn, and somehow the part offending you is still the possibility that a foreigner might be better at something."

T’Chaka’s remaining hand dug into the earth. The claws cut four narrow lines through the grass.

N’Jobu had named isolation cowardice. Wakanda had called it duty. Twelve loyal men had now paid for T’Chaka’s certainty before he did, and his claws sank deeper into the lawn.

"You know nothing of my country."

Lucius chuckled. "I know enough to erase it from the map by myself. More importantly, I know there are powers on this world that could do the same without considering it a difficult afternoon. Your great national achievement was convincing the neighbours that the empty field beside them contained nothing worth looking at."

T’Chaka’s voice flattened. "You threaten Wakanda because you killed twelve men in darkness?"

"No. I am threatening Wakanda because its king came into my house and tried to put me in a cage. The dead men are merely the receipt."

Pressure closed around T’Chaka’s throat and lifted him from the wall.

His one useful leg left the ground. The ruined knee hung at an angle, while invisible force held his torso upright and kept the broken ribs from folding further. Lucius watched the Panther suit stretch around the telekinetic grip, interested in the result and entirely unconcerned with the man inside it.

"Let me enlighten you."

Duskreaver’s crescent edge crossed T’Chaka’s left leg below the knee and continued into open air. The lower leg fell beneath him, still covered by a section of perfect black weave.

The telekinetic hold kept him aloft. More pressure tightened above the wound and slowed the bleeding.

T’Chaka’s vision narrowed. His body demanded unconsciousness, but training and anger kept dragging him back to the sight of his own leg on foreign soil.

Lucius lowered the axe head until its edge rested beneath the Panther mask.

"Consider tomorrow’s news. A king with two fewer limbs, wearing enough Vibranium to make every intelligence service on the planet start asking why a poor African country dressed its monarch in the rarest metal on Earth. They will count the weapons. They will examine the suit. Then they will ask what else you have been hiding."

T’Chaka saw foreign laboratories opening the suit, governments counting every gram of Vibranium, and diplomats arriving in Wakanda with demands disguised as cooperation. He had imagined that future often enough to kill his brother over it.

Lucius watched T’Chaka’s clawed hand go still. His grin sharpened.

"There it is," Lucius said softly. "You were more offended by my potions than by your soldiers dying. Now you are finally afraid of the right theft."

T’Chaka fought the hold around his throat. The claws of his remaining hand found only air.

"You will gain nothing from Wakanda."

"I already gained an educational evening."

Lucius drew Duskreaver away from the mask. The telekinetic grip turned T’Chaka toward the mansion, presenting the torn suit, the absent limbs, and the surviving black mask to the rifles surrounding the lawn.

"Tomorrow, Your Majesty, you are going to introduce your country to the world. Oh, the accusations they’ll stick to your arse." He chuckled. "Try to look royal."

-

Benjamin Carter woke to the sound of fighting and lay still long enough to determine whether the ceiling intended to join it.

Nothing fell. No alarm sounded inside the mansion. The guards were moving, someone outside shouted once, and a heavy impact travelled through the windows with enough force to make the glass complain.

Benjamin sighed and reached for his dressing gown.

This was not the first time armed idiots had mistaken Mr Noctis’s home for an easy target. Experience suggested that calling the police would create more paperwork than protection, while going downstairs before Mr Noctis finished would only place a butler within range of whatever lesson was currently being delivered.

He crossed to the window and moved the curtain by an inch.

Parts of the garden were visible beneath the estate lights. A planter had been destroyed, the outer wall was broken, and several dark shapes lay across grass that had been presentable before midnight.

Benjamin closed the curtain.

The garden could be replaced. The driveway required estimates, permits, and men who discovered extra charges whenever they saw the mansion. He hoped the invaders had possessed the decency to avoid damaging and creating more work for him.

Mr Noctis would not arrange the repairs. Benjamin added an emergency landscaper to the morning list, decided breakfast would require more coffee than usual, and returned to bed. If the mansion was still standing at dawn, administration could begin then.

-

Fury had not slept since the three Project Insight carriers opened fire on one another.

He had watched them tear through their own armour, watched burning systems fail, and watched all three machines fall. The weapons built to kill threats before they acted had managed one useful judgment at the end. They had identified themselves.

Dismantling SHIELD was harder.

Or HYDRA, Fury corrected, because precision mattered when the institution carrying his name had spent decades feeding its enemy. Every report exposed another buried department, protected account, compromised safe house, or officer whose clean record had survived because HYDRA controlled the people checking it.

By the fourth file, Fury no longer paused to be angry. He marked names for arrest, revoked credentials, abandoned facilities, and warned loyal agents before the wrong team reached them.

The latest report concerned Alexander Pierce’s purchase from Noctis.

The deal was worse in writing. One thousand regular Strengthening Potions. Two hundred enhanced. One and a half billion dollars in cash, followed by a deployment large enough to harden the Insight crews and nearly keep the carriers in the sky.

Recovery teams had confiscated roughly three hundred regular vials and twenty enhanced ones. That accounted for only part of the purchase, and Fury had no reliable count for what HYDRA had used or moved before the collapse.

The folder creased under Fury’s thumb before he set it aside.

His mind returned to an older time.

SHIELD agents had taken Noctis from his home, fitted him with an inhibitor, and explained why the procedure made the act legitimate. Noctis had answered in colourful language and refused any future work with them. He had called SHIELD terrorists. He had said the organisation picked up the mantle where HYDRA left it.

At the time, Fury had treated the comparison as one more insult from an unwilling asset who made vindictiveness sound like public service.

Now Pierce’s files sat open in front of him.

Noctis had not been HYDRA. That did not make him innocent. He had recognised Pierce, negotiated with him, and sold enough power to turn the collapse of SHIELD into a more expensive bloodbath. The documents also showed HYDRA measuring every approach around the possibility of Noctis becoming angry. They had wanted his supply and feared his attention.

Fury wondered whether the telepath had known what lived inside SHIELD when he made the accusation, or whether SHIELD had simply behaved badly enough to reach the correct answer without secret knowledge.

Neither possibility improved the night.

He sighed, pulled the next stack of reports across the table, and returned to the dismantling.

-

The search teams found Steve where Bucky had left him near the river and brought him back alive.

That should have made sleep easier.

Instead, every time Steve closed his eyes, the river became a Brooklyn alley, and the hand on his harness belonged to a young man who had been pulling him out of trouble long before either of them wore a uniform.

Before the serum, trouble had usually been taller than Steve and pleased by the difference. Bucky would arrive after Steve had already ignored every sensible chance to leave. He never asked whether the fight had been worth it until the other man was gone and Steve was upright again.

There had been too many alleys and rejected enlistment forms, followed by evenings when Bucky tried to steer him toward music, girls, or any activity less likely to end with Steve bleeding through his shirt.

Steve had remembered himself as stubborn. Memory was less generous. Bucky had spent years rescuing him from problems Steve entered with both eyes open, until the serum changed which one of them looked like he needed saving.

Now Bucky had dragged him out of the river.

Steve opened his eyes and stared at the dark hospital room. His side and thigh still hurt where Bucky had shot him. His mouth hurt where Bucky had hit him. Those injuries were simple. HYDRA had taken everything inside Bucky that recognised a friend, scraped it down to orders, and still failed to remove the part that had pulled Steve from the water after the mission ended.

He left the bed because lying still had become another way to watch the same memories.

Natasha had given him three possible telepaths. Xavier was safer, and the girl at Xavier’s school might have been kinder. Noctis was a man who had searched Natasha’s mind without permission, hated SHIELD, sold potions to HYDRA, and might decide that a damaged Winter Soldier was more useful than a healed Bucky Barnes.

Steve had already told Sam that he needed to speak to Noctis. In daylight, with another person in the room, the decision had sounded almost like a plan. At night it sounded like delivering his oldest friend to a different kind of cage.

He crossed to the window and stopped there.

Noctis had also survived SHIELD taking him from his home, putting an inhibitor on him, and calling the loss of choice procedure. Understanding that violation had not made him merciful. It did mean Steve could ask a question the man might consider worth answering.

What would it take to fix what HYDRA had done to Bucky’s mind?

Steve would not promise access, custody, loyalty, or payment that belonged to someone else. He would listen. If Noctis spoke about Bucky as property, Steve would walk away and find Xavier.

It was not a good plan. Bucky had never required Steve’s plans to be good before coming back for him.

At sunrise, Steve would call Sam. Then they would find Lucius Noctis.