"Suche die gegend!"

The sound of quick footsteps and German shouts sent a bolt of fear up Evangeline's spine, along with the sight of the men running down the road, past the destroyed truck and headed straight for the Hydra base less than a mile away. She raised an eyebrow is suspicion. Back up? Why would they need reinforcements? The American prisoners had stolen all of their tanks, blown up over a third of the entire facility, destroyed nearly every German soldier inside, and were now high-tailing it back to their own base. Why the hell would Hydra send a group of their own men back to... Her eyes grew wide as the realization hit her like a brick to the face.

Steve. By some miraculous breakthrough of science, her once five-foot six, eighty-five pound asthmatic buddy from Brooklyn was now ripped as hell and could breathe properly. And Bucky. How could she have forgotten about him. The only reason Steve would've stayed behind is if there was some chance that Bucky was still alive. Those soldiers were going back to kill her boys.

Those bastards wouldn't get very far.

Within the next ten seconds, she did a multitude of stupid things. The first one being that she climbed out of the ditch; a big 'no no' when it came to hiding from the enemy. The second one was that she'd exerted too much of her energy in the act of pulling herself out of the channel dug next to the road, causing her to sound like the asthmatic one instead of Steve. And the third, on top of all that stupidity, while she was bent over, heaving for air, the woman opened her mouth and yelled 'Hey!'

Now at this point, she'd gotten lucky; none of the German soldiers were paying attention to her. The must not have heard or seen her at all, because they just keeping making their way towards the Azzano base. But did she see that fortunate neglect as a blessing? No. So she did the next best thing. Evangeline thought of a nasty German saying that one of her soldier friends had taught all the other guys in their squad. No one knew what it meant, but it must have been bad because as soon as the phrase left her mouth, every single one of the Hydra reinforcements stopped dead in their tracks and turned around to face the woman that had so blatantly insulted them.

"Mein hamster singt besser als deine!"

Although she couldn't see their facial expressions behind their metal helmets, Evangeline still got their attention and that was all she cared about.

She didn't exactly have a plan when she stepped into this steaming pile of horse crap, it sort of just flowed naturally as she began to feel a warm sensation flowing through her hands. Though it still stung and burned as the liquid continued to move through her veins, she began to feel as though she was finally getting used to it, like she was growing numb to the fire under her skin. She'd never used her new power before, for she'd been too scared of just how much damage she was capable of causing, how many people she could kill. But when she knew her boys were in trouble, Evangeline couldn't just hide.

As the woman stood in the center of the gravel road, a piece of shrapnel from their truck caught her attention. It was a piece of metal bent at a weird angle due to the explosion and it still glowed a bright yellow from the heat of the blast, the same bright yellow that her palms and fingertips were glowing as well. Before the Hydra soldiers could figure out what this strange-looking woman dressed in an over-sized coat was doing, she wrapped her right hand around the hot piece of metal and ran her fingers on her left across the heated surface, leaving five long lines of super-human magma.

"Catch!" She yelled and hurled the luminescent piece of material as hard as she possibly could. Like a shooting star, the hand-made grenade soared through the air in a magnificent ark. At first, the Germans weren't too impressed; they glanced from the burning object, stepped to the side so it wouldn't land directly on them, and aimed their weapons at the half-naked lady a few yards away.

They thought she was crazy, another one of Schmidt's science experiments gone mad. It would only take a second to put her down and be on their way again, as if nothing had interrupted their journey at all. Maybe they'd laugh about it over a drink the next chance they got, turn into one of those crazy old war stories about the insane crap they'd seen during their time on the front lines. 

The group of men never expected that the piece of glowing metal would make a crater in the ground the size of an airplane.

The explosion was unbelievably louder than the one Evangeline had heard before and ten times as bright as a normal gasoline-based fire. For a split second, the entire forest was lit up like night had suddenly turned to day, before the light faded away and the sonic-boom thundered. The blast sent her flying backwards and falling on her side against the coarse ground beneath her. By instinct and pure instinct alone, her now normal-looking hands reached up and wrapped around her head to protect herself from the debris of the explosion, though most of the matter nearest to the makeshift grenade's epicenter had been completely obliterated. 

Her ears rang and all she could hear was the drumming beat of her own heart, trying to jump out of her chest like a frightened bird in a cage. Like a thousand fireworks had suddenly gone off right next to her ears, the monumental explosion left the woman dazed, laying there in a heap on the ground, trying to focus on breathing at a normal rate.

When she finally managed to pull herself together and sit up, the damage the explosion had caused made her audibly gasp and cover her mouth with her hands.

The forest had been leveled at least twenty-five yards from where the initial contact had been made, though the trees began to get taller towards the farther edges of the explosion. The flora surrounding the road was blackened, some twigs and trunks of trees were aflame and there was an enormous black pit in the center of the gravel road. There was no sign of the Hydra soldiers.

Oh my god. What the hell did I do?

She jumped slightly when a hand gently touched her shoulder a few minutes later. She quickly turned her head to see who it was and saw that Henry had woken up, his eyes were even more scared than they'd been before and his ears were bleeding. 

"Are you okay?" Angie quickly got to her feet and began to tend to Henry's needs. She needed a distraction from whatever on God's green earth just happened. They both did. "Can you hear me?" If Henry suddenly went deaf because of her actions, she would never forgive herself. The young man nodded and Evangeline let out a sigh of relief before slinging his arm over her shoulder again and the two started walking down the road. "How far away is the base from here again?"

"Twenty-five...maybe thirty miles..." 

From the way Henry was talking and just how heavily he was relying on Angie's support, she knew something was wrong. He'd possibly suffered a concussion, most likely from when the truck flipped and they hit their heads on the metal part of the vehicle. Evangeline took a deep, tired breath.

"Alright, let's get a move-on, then."