It wasn’t a coincidence that Ophelia had been pressuring me so relentlessly these past few weeks, asking “between the lines” for more financial prophecies. When I confronted her, the truth came out with an almost insulting coldness: HYDRA had tried to parasite off my success.
Her superiors, trying to replicate my masterstroke, had copied my initial investment moves in Stark Industries. But they were missing the key piece of the puzzle. It wasn’t insider information. It wasn’t luck. It was something worse for them: the certainty with which I spoke about the future, as if my words were fact and not a bet.
When Tony shut down the weapons division, HYDRA’s analysts saw a ship sinking beyond saving. They saw a “moralist” Tony Stark—traumatized, incapable of selling war again. Their cold algorithms ruled the risk unacceptable. They knew nothing about the Arc Reactor—critical information I kept locked down even from Ophelia.
The result was pathetic. Gripped by financial panic, they liquidated their massive position at the worst possible moment, swallowing million-dollar losses that crippled several of their covert operations—an “acceptable tactical loss,” in their words, to avoid an imaginary total collapse.
They had to retreat with their tails between their legs while they watched me—a supposed “madman” running a company in the red—double down and take the whole pie.
Now they understood my “madness” wasn’t chaos. It was anomalous precision. And it left them hungry for information.
My paranoia jumped two degrees in an instant when my [Tactical Map] blinked. New York—relatively calm on my radar—suddenly became infested with red dots. It was like watching an infection spread in real time. Before I could step out to investigate, Ophelia’s encrypted message arrived and explained everything.
What irritated me wasn’t the content.
It was the fact that she could get it.
According to Ophelia, she tapped into HYDRA’s internal information without asking permission. In theory, that looked like loyalty to me… but my paranoia didn’t hand out noble interpretations. If HYDRA was opening doors for her, it was for a reason.
Either they were using her to lower the tension between us—after so many moves “in HYDRA’s favor” to earn my trust—or Ophelia had leveled up inside the organization far faster than she should’ve… thanks to the services my inner circle had enabled her to offer. Dimensional logistics. Contacts. Access money can’t buy.
I didn’t know which option was more dangerous.
But for the moment, that was secondary.
What mattered was that reality was worse than my nightmares had projected.
[Intelligence Report: OPHELIA > ATLAS] “S.H.I.E.L.D. has you in its sights. They’ve opened a cross-file: Target ‘Fantasma’ and Target ‘Atlas Corporation’.”
HYDRA’s analysis of the situation was chilling in its precision. I’d drawn too much attention.
As Fantasma, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have to guess everything from scratch. Tony Stark talked. Not out of heroism, but paranoia: after surviving that situation, the thought of it ever happening again must’ve been unbearable. He told what he had to and left out what was humiliating, of course… but even a trimmed version of the story was dynamite. A captor who negotiated technology in the middle of the desert, an impossible method to move resources without leaving a trace, and a feeling that didn’t fit any common criminal: absolute control.
As Atlas, the rest was a chain of coincidences too perfect to be coincidence. The accelerated expansion, the surgical growth… and my moves in the market—buying Stark stock right at the abyss before it shot into the sky. It didn’t look like luck; it looked like prescience.
And then there was the detail that closed the vise: the “rescue.”
Atlas was the one that reached that massive stretch of desert with helicopters, personnel, and logistics as if it knew exactly where to look. To Fury, that wasn’t corporate efficiency. That was someone setting the board in advance. A company showing up too fast in the exact place, at the exact time.
With those pieces, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intelligence analysts connected the dots and formed a dangerous hypothesis: Fantasma and Atlas were working in symbiosis.
Their analysts weren’t stupid; they assembled the puzzle piece by piece:
The only one who knew for certain that Tony Stark would return from the desert alive—and that he possessed technology capable of revolutionizing the world—was his captor/negotiator: Fantasma.
Marcus, Atlas’s CEO, bought aggressively against every logical financial forecast, acting with absolute certainty that Stark would come back and win.
Even if the public excuse of “wanting to get into the weapons business” was solid, the investment was financial suicide for any sane CEO without insider information.
And the pattern didn’t end there. The final proof: it was “El Fantasma” who officially contacted Atlas to handle transport logistics in Gotham.
To Nick Fury’s paranoid eyes, Atlas Corporation was no longer just a lucky company—it was the money-laundering front, and operational cover, for an emerging supervillain.
And to cap off the nightmare, Ophelia’s message ended with one last line that froze my blood:
“The information has leaked. A.R.G.U.S. has joined the hunt as well. They already had a file on you since the theft of the Kryptonian Alloy fragments and the sonic weapon… and the death of one of their men. Confirmation that you were a child came through the same crack as always: that call you triggered so the police would secure the weapon… and that you later turned into chaos. The rest was just connecting dots.”
With confirmation that the two largest intelligence agencies on the planet—S.H.I.E.L.D. and A.R.G.U.S.—were on my trail, I understood why my map had flooded with red dots trying to slip into Atlas’s payroll. The first wave of hacking had eased, yes… but only because they’d changed methods. The drip of physical spies was constant: perfect résumés, flawless interviews, trained smiles.
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Slamming the doors shut would’ve been an admission of guilt. And in Fury’s world, any defensive move gets read as a confession. So I decided to do the only sensible thing: play his own game.
Time was my scarcest resource. I couldn’t afford to investigate every candidate like it was a trial. I needed a filter that was fast, repeatable, and discreet. And more than anything, I needed to cover a hole my own System couldn’t plug by itself.
The [Spider Web Network] warned me when hostile intent was born inside my territory or inside my company. But a competent spy doesn’t show up thinking about killing you. They show up thinking about watching. Listening. Getting in. The hostility doesn’t surface until the end… when it’s already too late.
So I implemented a new, drastic hiring protocol.
I instructed Human Resources to use the [Pen of Truth]—a minor item I bought from the shop for 460 System Gold and passed off as “psychometric analysis technology patented by Atlas”—in every interview.
With that pen and a battery of questions designed to catch subtle inconsistencies, I gave a counterintuitive order: any candidates the pen flagged as “Neutral” or slightly “Red”—suspected of espionage, but not active killers or immediate threats—were to be hired deliberately.
It was a trap. A honey operation.
I placed them in mid- to low-level administrative positions, buried under bureaucracy, protocols, and sterile meetings. No vaults. No labs. No sensitive contracts. Just paperwork—the kind of boring company a spy hates reporting on.
My goal was simple: I wanted them inside, seeing a “normal” Atlas, and reporting back to their handlers in S.H.I.E.L.D. or A.R.G.U.S. that everything was fine. They would be my living alibi. My white noise. My human curtain.
In contrast, the true heart of Atlas—the Advanced Technology Division—was locked down airtight. I only allowed access to scientists whose loyalty level exceeded 80%, a figure verified twice: by my System, and by my own invasive screening protocols.
They were the elite—the only ones with the privilege of knowing “L” existed, the faceless scientist guiding their breakthroughs.
But hardening Manhattan wasn’t enough. Even with all the money in the world, it was still a glass island in the middle of New York, surrounded by millions of eyes, cameras, and satellites. I needed a real sanctuary. A place where surveillance couldn’t breathe.
For that, I turned to Vargas’s network.
I was looking for a “unicorn” in the criminal world: someone I could trust absolutely, with a spotless legal record. We found the perfect candidate among his lieutenants.
Thanks to my own money-laundering logistics, the man had managed to convert his underworld earnings into a successful legal business.
He’d never set foot in a precinct. He’d never been booked. To the system, he was a model citizen. To me, he was a subordinate with loyalty above 80%.
I used him as a front man to buy a discreet, forgotten industrial lot in Queens without raising a single suspicion.
On the surface, we put up a simple windowless concrete hangar: a boring, generic fa?ade. A building nobody would look at twice. But the real construction went downward.
I started excavating a massive underground complex. To keep absolute secrecy, I used my Dimensional Inventory to make tons of earth and rock vanish instantly, eliminating the need for dump trucks, prolonged noise, and disposal routes that would’ve tipped off anyone with attentive eyes.
But digging a hole is one thing. Installing complex electrical systems, ventilation, drainage, and livable finishes is something else entirely. I needed expert human hands.
That’s where “El Fantasma” came into play.
I extorted specialized construction crews, temporarily kidnapping them under forced contracts. I transported them straight into the worksite inside my inventory.
Once they were in, I manipulated the environment with hidden industrial air conditioning, dropping the temperature drastically until it became an artificial polar cold. I kept them uncomfortable—shivering, minds focused on surviving the climate instead of memorizing details.
I made them believe they were working on a government black site somewhere remote in Canada or Alaska, not beneath Queens.
The result was a fortress.
I designed the security strictly around the System’s standards: to enter without authorization required a [Stealth Level 5] skill combined with biometric access codes tied to my own retina.
If anyone tried to force their way in, they’d need roughly a Level 7 or higher attack power to break the structural defenses.
The interior construction would still take time before it was fully operational, but the perimeter was already a wall. As I watched the workers shiver in their imaginary “Alaska,” I knew I’d made the right decision.
It was the only logical move.
I couldn’t just walk into the Triskelion and threaten Nick Fury into leaving me alone. He wasn’t a man you could scare; he was an entire system—an idea with an infinite budget.
So I had to become undetectable.
I had to be a ghost.
From the dark rooftops, I watched my network run in silence. I saw supposed “civilians” moving through Queens’s streets—low-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and police keeping an eye on the neighborhood—desperately searching for my criminal organization’s supply routes.
I smiled with arrogance. They wouldn’t find anything. They would never find anything.
My Dimensional Inventory erased logistics from the equation. There were no drug trucks and no weapon vans crossing the district’s borders to be intercepted; I was the transport route. I was the entire supply chain.
Satisfied with my logistical invisibility, I stopped staring at the holographic map and fixed my actual gaze on the main entrance of Atlas Tower.
The automatic doors slid open, and the world seemed to pause for a second. A red-haired woman stepped out—strikingly beautiful, her stride predator-elegant—with a folder tucked under her arm.
I didn’t have to guess. Blood-red text, vibrant and dangerous, floated above her head:
[System: You have found a key character: Natasha Romanoff] [Threat Level: Red]
According to Marcus’s report, she’d started that very week as an executive secretary in the military development department. Her résumé was flawless, meticulously built to be legally impossible to reject without raising suspicion of gender discrimination.
Natasha had cleared the polygraph and the psychological interviews with robotic coldness, fooling every one of my Human Resources experts.
Even so, my System exposed her the instant she crossed Atlas’s doors. She wasn’t like the other “Neutrals” the [Pen of Truth] flagged—people who came in to snoop around the company, steal data, carry out an espionage assignment without making it personal.
Natasha was different.
She was a solid, absolute red… the color of someone who wasn’t here to infiltrate a corporation, but to capture a man. Fantasma.
“Hostile Loyalty / Active Spy.”
That was what my System was reading between the lines: her real target wasn’t Atlas. It was me. She wasn’t trying to kill me—S.H.I.E.L.D. prefers cages to corpses—but locking me up was a direct threat to my integrity. And the System understood that better than any polygraph.
Even so, I let her in, knowing perfectly well who she was.
Because if the Black Widow was on the board, there was no “safe” option. Either I kept her inside—where my cameras, my logs, and my patterns could track every step… or I left her outside, invisible, hunting my trail in the real world, cutting threads in my network without me ever seeing the hand.
And I didn’t gift darkness to a predator.
But seeing her walk out so calmly, moving as if she owned the sidewalk, set off every alarm in my head.
"This is getting too dangerous," I murmured to myself from the neighboring rooftop ledge, feeling the night’s cold wind. "If the Widow is here in broad daylight, S.H.I.E.L.D. has already moved its heavy pieces. Fantasma needs to disappear for a while."
Suddenly, Natasha made a nearly imperceptible move.
She didn’t look up. She didn’t break her stride. She simply turned her body slightly, giving me her back at a mathematically calculated angle—using her silhouette to block the corner security camera’s line of sight.
It was a signal. But not for me.
{Tactical Map: IMMINENT DANGER! HIGH-VELOCITY PROJECTILE!}
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