Black Widow and the Marvel Girls (2010 series) #1

Black Widow infiltrates the compound of illegal arms dealer Gregor Ballant, tricking his army of guards while being guided through an earpiece by Ivan Petrovich. Ivan warns her that if Ballant reaches his panic room and locks himself inside, there will be no way to get him out and the mission will have to be aborted. She fights more guards but she is too late, Ballant reaches his panic room and slams the door. Natasha will not give up, though, she has been planning for this mission for six months and she sits down at a laptop….

Natasha has a sudden vision of herself as a child, sending the reader back ten years to young Natasha being a pupil of the notorious Red Room. She keeps failing at her training in violence and withstanding pain so that the head man decides she will be sacrificed as part of the training for the best students. But, unseen to all, Amora the Enchantress enters the facility and finds Natasha; introducing herself, she notes that Natasha is going to die there so Amora is going to teach her how to break out of a heavily fortified training facility. Amora imbues her with the talents she needs to escape so Nat then crashes through a door, punches out a guard then seizes his Uzi and mows down other guards. As they emerge into the open, Nat asks Amora why she is doing this; Amora explains that she is an immortal and immortals get bored so she thought she would cause some explosions. Nat shoots more guards, blowing up a truck. Amora tells Nat she just needs to make it past the fence….

Natasha hacks into the surveillance system so she can appear to Ballant on the large screen inside his refuge. She tries matching wits with him to get him out of the panic room but suddenly she is seized by the guards and shot. Then Ballant’s security chief, Constantine Barlow, arrives, guns down Natasha and delivers the fatal shot to her brain. Ballant opens the door to find Black Widow waiting for him. She shoots his bodyguard with her Widow’s Bite and explains to her captive that she filmed her performance for his screen several days earlier with the help of Barlow, turned against his boss. Ivan orders her to abort the mission but she calmly replies that she has completed the mission….

Back to the Red Room: Just as Natasha makes it to the fence, Amora zaps her, admitting that she lied, never trust beauty. The guards pick up the stunned Natasha but the head man says he now sees a lot of potential and Nat is sent back to the training program….