24 Chapter 24

I don't know if anyone will like this chapter. (I wrote down things my tired brain could come up with.)

Max crushes his mobile in his palm and says, "Ava, immediately track the location of the sender."

Ava replies, "On it."

Meanwhile, Max is walking around in the room in panic. He wonders, "Who would even think of doing this? The S.H.I.E.L.D. obviously wouldn't, not after the warning I gave them. There is a possibility of Hydra doing it, but I doubt they would do that. They have been planning their world dominance for years and would obviously wait until they were confident that they could deal with me. Still, I can't dismiss the possibility.Other than them, no one else should know about me to try and use Ana to try and control me."

After a few moments, Ava says, "Max, I found the location of the sender. It is now offline, but the last known location is this," showing a red dot on a map.

Max looks at the map and finds a small cottage in the middle of a forest. Max says, "Ava, send me the location."

Ava replies, "Max, you just broke your phone."

Max says, "Then point out which direction it is from here and how far it is. Also, cover for me and make sure that Lisa doesn't find out about this."

Ava replies, "The location is 200 miles east of us. I sent a message to Lisa that you are in a meeting with the members of S.H.I.E.L.D. She shouldn't disturb you till the meeting is over."

Max says "Thanks" and flies off through the window towards the said location.

He zooms through the sky with maximum speed, his face filled with rage. He was angry, both at the kidnappers and at himself for letting this happen.

It doesn't take him long to get to the cottage made completely out of wood, which looked very old and had moss all over it with a few broken pieces of wood hanging with nothing but a single nail.

He looks for people with his ability to see electricity, but to his surprise, he finds no one. He looks closer and finds a small amount of electricity in the cottage. When he looks closer, he finds a smartphone.

"Shit. They are not here. Did someone leave it here on purpose, or did they run away after realizing I was coming? They couldn't have gotten far enough with the speed I was flying, so I should be able to sense them." Max says this and walks into the cottage.

With each step he took, the weak wood under his feet cracked and felt like it could break at any time. He walks toward the phone and picks it up. It was a cheap smartphone, and it had the battery removed and kept on the side. Removable batteries still existed at the time.

Max inserts the battery, turns it on, and goes through it. He then finds 10 numbers in the call log. He then sends himself, basically Ava, to hack into the phone and call him.

He finishes sending the mail and goes out of the cottage. He is pissed now. "Even after having this much power, I can't even protect a single person." Max says this and clenches his fists, with electric sparks all over his body.

He almost broke the phone, but stopped when he got the call. He picks it up and hears the familiar female robotic voice, "Max, did you find anything?"

Max replies, "No, Ava, go through the call logs of this phone and get me their locations."

Ava replies, "In a minute."

Max then sees his mobile automatically enter those numbers in a mail and send it to Max. Ava receives the numbers, and after a while, she says, "Max, all 10 of them are offline, and their last known locations are different. They are all pretty far from each other."

Max listens to her and says, "They are stalling for time. We have to get there fast."

The electric sparks around him immediately disappear, and instead, there is a bright light emanating from his body. 

Max then flies off towards them, with Ava giving him directions from the phone he picked up. He was now zooming through the air at high speeds.

In a minute, he gets there, and like the previous place, he just finds an abandoned cottage with a cellphone inside with the battery to the side. He asks Ava to go through the phone, and again, he finds 10 more numbers in it. 

Max says to Ava "Ava, this will only waste more time. I know you can't hack into them when they don't have their battery, and we don't have any other leads apart from these numbers. We have to think of another way."

Ava says, "Max, it is already 4:00 p.m. and will soon get dark. The difficulty of the search increases at night."

Max says, "I know. We have to find her before it gets dark and before the kidnapper contacts us again. Once they contact us and we can't find her by then, I will have no choice but to do what they say."

Max then flew off towards the next nine locations of the numbers he got from the first phone he discovered. It took him five minutes to get to the other locations, and they weren't any different from the first one.

He started going to the other locations of the numbers he had recently found. Max was just running around like a madman, with a single lead on finding Ana.

It took him half an hour to get to the other 10 locations of the numbers he found in each of the first 10 locations he searched. 

If someone didn't understand, he first found the location of the sender of the email, went there, and it had 10 numbers. He went to the locations of those ten numbers and found a mobile phone at each place, with each having 10 more numbers.

Max, when he found the final phone empty, blasted the phone into his arm and screamed. He was flying around on the outskirts of New York like a madam, collecting stupid phones.

No, with no leads left to follow, he looked lost, not knowing what to do, but then he heard his phone ringing. He looked at the caller ID, and it was Ava.

He picks it up and asks, "Ava, please tell me you have something that can help me now."

Ava says, "Max, you have a call, and it is from Ana."

"What?!" Max shouts.

He immediately says, "Connect the call."

After a few seconds, he hears a voice he recognizes, and it almost makes him tear up. He finally felt relieved when he heard her voice. Ana, from the other side, says, "Max... Max... Can you hear me?" Since she didn't get any reply after he picked up the call,.

Max says, "Yes, Ana, I can hear you. Where are you right now? I will immediately come and get you."

Ana asked in a confused voice, "Are we going somewhere? If it is McDonald's again, I am not coming."

This time, Max was confused. He asked her, "Ana, where are you?"

"At home, where else?" Ana replied in a confused tone.

Max didn't say anything when he heard that. Ana then asks, "Why? What happened?"

Max says, "Nothing. Stay at home. We are coming home early today."

Ana says, "Fine. I called to ask what time you two would come."

Ana then hangs up, but the call was still connected with Ava. Ava says to Max, "According to the data I have on Ana, her voice resembles Ana by 97.57%."

Max says, "Don't say anything else. I want to confirm first before coming to that conclusion."

Max then immediately flies to the office and finds Lisa, surprisingly, the only one in the office. He flies in through the window, which didn't even make her flinch. She got used to him flying in through the window.

Seeing him come from outside, Lisa asked, "Weren't you supposed to be in a meeting with the council members of S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

Max replied, "Yes, but the meeting ended, so I flew out to relax a bit."

Lisa then says, "I was on a call with Ana just now, and she said that you said that we were leaving home early today."

Max says, "Well, apart from the occasional meetings with investors, we hardly have work to do. I know that we have more meetings, so no use staying here."

Lisa replies, "Fine."

Max then asked, "Also, where is Trask?"

Lisa replied, "Oh. Just a while ago, I was passing by his lab when I saw him almost fainting from fatigue. So, I asked him to go home and take a few days of leave."

Max says, "I knew that old man would drag down the company with him. I should've sent him home this morning."

Max continues after a pause. "Anyway, we are going home." Pulling Lisa closer to him and picking Lisa up by her waist, he flies off through the window towards his home.

Lisa noticed that he was going faster than usual, and his face, even though he tried his best to hide it, showed signs of tension and worry.

Lisa asks, "Max, is something bothering you?"

Max obviously wasn't going to tell her what actually happened, but he also couldn't hide it for long since she and Ana would make him spit it out some other way.

Max says, "Well, I was working on the supercomputer and got an error saying there was a missing component and started going through the office, searching for it, but in the end, it was there where it was supposed to be. Now I am thinking about why that happened and what was happening."

Lisa immediately knew Max wasn't talking about the supercomputer. She doesn't pry into it and says, "This is a common case of overthinking."

Seeing Max confused, she continues, "Now, Max, the simple way would be to search for it where it is supposed to be, but you didn't search there because you thought that since the part is missing, it wouldn't be there, and looking there would only waste time."

When Max heard what she said, everything immediately started making sense. 'Damn, am I even more dumb than a dumb person?' Max asked himself.

Now, when someone gets a video saying that someone they knew was kidnapped, only a dumb person would confirm that the person was kidnapped.

Don't shit on me if this doesn't make sense. I am tired, and I am writing what my mind can come up with.

Max felt dumb that all he had to do was call and confirm, but instead, he went around searching for her like a madman. 

Max then flies into Ana's room to check on her, and there Max sees the sheets on the bed were the same as the ones in the video he got. This made him feel worse. Someone just came to his house, took a two-second video of Ana during her afternoon nap, and made him dance on their fingertips.

"Why would they do this?" Max wonders when he gets a call. Expecting Ava to call him regarding some work, he gets it out of his pocket, but it was a video call from some unknown person.

He asks Lisa to join Ana in the kitchen and picks up the call. Max hears the same distorted voice he heard from the video say, "Max, I hope you liked the little game we played. I sure had lots of fun."

Max clenched his fist, holding the phone, and almost crushed it. The voice then says, "Calm down, Max; you want our first conversation to end like this."

Max was bubbling with rage. He suppresses it and asks, "Why?"

The voice says with a serious tone, "You are messing with our plans, which we have been planning for years. It is best to keep you in place and tell you that we are also not someone you can mess with. So, then next time you decide to mess with one of us, think of the people around you."

The calls hang up, and this time Max crushes the phone with his hands and murmurs, "Pierce.....Hydra...congratulations! You've got another mortal enemy besides Captain America."