No one knew how much ti had passed before Pierce finally finished reading the file in his hands.
He closed the file, set it down on the table, and reached for his teacup. Just as he was about to take a sip, however, he suddenly sensed that sothing was wrong.
Sothing in the room felt… off.
Without changing his expression, he calmly lifted the cup and took a drink of hot tea. At the sa ti, his other hand quietly moved behind him.
"Good evening, Mr. Pierce."
Just as his hand touched the gun tucked behind him, a clear, youthful voice shattered the silence.
Pierce shot to his feet.
In one swift motion, he drew the pistol and aid toward the source of the voice—the bar counter in the living room.
Two figures were sitting there on the high stools.
And the mont he saw the face of one of them, Pierce's pupils contracted slightly, and his heart sank straight to the bottom.
"So, you recognized . Secretary Pierce."
Matthew rose from the stool calmly. Beside him, Neagley, who had been casually examining a bottle of whiskey, set it down and followed him forward.
As an exceptionally skilled politician, Pierce's ability to perform was no worse than any award-winning actor in Hollywood.
His expression imdiately shifted into one of complete confusion.
"Who are you people? Why have you broken into my ho? If it's money you want, I can give you a considerable amount. I only ask that you don't hurt ."
"Save it, Secretary."
Matthew walked directly toward him.
"You can control your facial muscles, your eyes, even your body language—but you can't completely suppress emotional fluctuations."
He stopped right in front of Pierce and casually reached out, taking the gun from Pierce's hand as if removing a toy from a child.
The truth was, the mont Matthew approached, Pierce had every intention of pulling the trigger.
But the instant that thought arose, an overwhelming pressure crashed down on him like a mountain.
A terrifying aura.
Matthew's monstrous Conqueror's Haki had already locked onto him completely.
His will was being battered rcilessly by that overwhelming force. Pierce felt like a lone boat lost in a storm-tossed ocean, crushed beneath endless thunder and violent waves.
Even his consciousness began to blur.
His body refused to obey him.
To his horror, he realized that even moving a single finger had beco an impossible luxury.
Fear spread through him like poison.
At that mont, Pierce fully understood—
his identity had been completely exposed.
No matter how Matthew had discovered it, the result was the sa.
He was in real danger.
His survival instincts forced him to fight against the suffocating haze clouding his mind.
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to stay conscious and spoke with difficulty.
"You know who I am. Then you also understand what stands behind . Whether you plan to kill or use for sothing… you'd better think very carefully, Matthew."
Matthew didn't answer.
Instead, he bent down, picked up the file lying on the table, then stepped back and sat leisurely on the nearby sofa, flipping through its contents as though he had no real interest in talking to Pierce at all.
At this point, Pierce himself wasn't even worth the conversation.
Neagley, however, stepped forward and stood in front of Pierce, studying him up and down for quite a while before clicking her tongue in amazent.
"Well, well… Secretary-General Pierce—or should I say, leader of Hydra?"
She gave a low whistle.
"I have to admit, when I first heard it, even I was shocked."
After all, who would believe it?
The dignified Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the most powerful n in the world… was secretly the leader of Hydra, that infamous evil organization despised by the entire world.
If that truth were exposed, the entire world would erupt overnight.
Hydra—an organization that had once stirred monstrous waves across the globe, a force so massive it had nearly defeated the Allied powers and rewritten the entire course of history.
Ever since the end of World War II, Hydra had supposedly been completely dismantled and erased. For decades, people believed it existed only in history books, a dead relic of a darker age.
But the truth was far more terrifying.
Hydra had never truly been destroyed.
It had simply hidden itself—lurking in the shadows, parasitic, silently growing stronger.
Neagley understood exactly how frightening an organization like that could be. It wasn't just about influence or resources. It was their ambition that made them truly dangerous.
When Neagley tore away that final layer of pretense, it ant there was no room left for lies between them. Both sides had laid their cards on the table.
Pierce understood imdiately—this was no longer negotiation. It was life or death.
Fighting against the haze creeping over his mind, he desperately tried to think of so way to bargain for his survival, but Neagley had already decided not to give him that chance.
Without hesitation, she reached out.
Her hand pierced straight through Pierce's skull.
Then, as though reaching into water, she slid her hand into his brain and gently pulled sothing out.
When her hand erged, she was holding a long strip of film—an impossibly strange reel covered with moving images.
It was Pierce's mory.
The mont that section of mory was extracted, Pierce's face twisted in agony. His body trembled violently, and he nearly passed out from the pain.
Neagley, however, only grinned.
"Ahh, now this is a fascinating ability. I like this one."
She began flipping through the mory film, studying the images one by one.
"Let's see… what a wonderfully colorful life you've lived. Strategic Holand Intervention, Enforcent and Logistics Division… the Operation Paperclip program… bringing in German scientists… letting Hydra's researchers infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D…"
She clicked her tongue.
"Doctor Zola… and the Project Insight."
Her expression shifted as she kept reading.
"Wow. Even these congressn are yours too? Impressive. Honestly, that's terrifying."
At first, she comnted casually, almost teasingly, but the deeper she looked, the heavier her expression beca.
It really was terrifying.
S.H.I.E.L.D.—a secretive organization established during World War II—had spent decades expanding into a massive force hidden from the public eye.
Its responsibilities covered intelligence gathering, counterterrorism, counter-espionage, and even dealing with supernatural and extraterrestrial threats. It operated under an extrely strict hierarchy with layers upon layers of classified access.
Its authority was so imnse that it answered directly only to the President's office in the White House.
Its agents were spread across the globe, ready to support operations anywhere at any ti. Those agents weren't just combat personnel either—they included scientists, engineers, intelligence analysts, and specialists of every kind.
It even maintained its own schools and training facilities for agents.
And most absurd of all, it possessed an entire helicarrier fleet dedicated to combat support.
Even soone like Neagley, who had seen more than enough of the world's darkness, felt a suffocating sense of pressure from the sheer scale of it.
The current director was Nick Fury—a man even Alexander Pierce had to remain wary of.
And beneath an organization like that, Hydra had infiltrated everything.
They had private training bases scattered across the world. Ard forces of every size hidden in every corner of the globe.
If Pierce wished it, a portion of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents would defect on the spot—and not just ordinary agents, but many high-ranking officials as well.
Its influence stretched worldwide.
Its sphere of influence was vast.
Its power absolute.
Taken together, Alexander Pierce stood at the absolute peak of the world.
If he hadn't made the mistake of provoking her boss, Matthew, he might have continued growing like this—quietly controlling the world from behind the curtain.
But unfortunately for him…
all of it was about to belong to her boss.
Because the miraculous Devil Fruit Matthew had given her didn't rely allow her to extract and read mories.
It could also alter them.
Rewrite them.
Even implant entirely false mories.
That was true control—the kind that reached into the soul itself.
Of course, how effective it was still depended on the target's willpower.
But sadly for Pierce, that problem had already been solved.
Monts ago, his will had been completely crushed beneath Matthew's Conqueror's Haki. His ntal defenses had collapsed entirely.
Now, he was nothing more than an open book.
And Neagley could take whatever she wanted from his mories—freely, thoroughly, and without resistance.
..
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