My eyes glanced over the city, but with a level of detail being retained that only a machine could match. I had taken some time to wipe out all the drones that I had spotted on the way here, but even then there was always more being teleported in. So dealing with them needed to be put on the back seat for arriving at Stark Tower and dealing with the threat there.
"Brainiac's gotta have taken over the portal stabilization on that big ship of his," I turned to the Odin brothers with a frown, ignoring Thor's jubilation over my good health to focus on the matter at hand. "But that doesn't mean we can't destabilize it from this side of the portal, right?"
The only person here that knew anything about this was sadly Loki. The green-wearing Norse god was a bit of a shithead really, and probably had his own plans of betraying us at any moment. But I'm also sure that he didn't want to be killed by Brainiac, nor even to be outdone by the guy.
So I was hoping that his prima-donna nature would be the driving motivation at the moment.
"I doubt we have the time to set anything up," Loki started to explain, nonchalantly blasting a few drones that had appeared with the blue blasts from the scepter, shooting them down at a rate that outpaced what I had from Thor coming in. "I'd need a week and a legion of Asgardian spellcasters to create something to negate Brainiac's efforts. Anything I could do alone sadly ends with my death."
"What about you, Stark?" I asked, changing tracks and pressing a finger against a communicator that had been placed in my ear. It was small but had a powerful range. "Think you could come up with something to disrupt the Portal?"
Stark took this moment to land beside me, scaring the shit out of Louise who jumped in fright. It was hard for someone to hear a hulking armored man fly through the sky when Thor, and sometimes in spurts Loki, were continually blasting robots out of the sky.
Romanoff was dropped from his arms too, landing with a gentle pop from her footwear. She and Barton shared a glance, one that was filled with a tense eagerness that made me question the nature of their relationship. It wasn't lustful, but it appeared deeper than what I'd expect from people in a work style friendship.
They were close, relieved to see each other. I could tell.
"I'm working on a shoestring here, Blue," Stark replied to my question, his eyes glancing towards the side of the building. "If we only had a wheelbarrow that would be something."
"Where's an albino where you need them?" I shook my head, sighing as my ears picked up the roar of a familiar green giant on the streets below. I noted Stark's new armor, and it seemed he'd been having a bit of a tough time from how it appeared. "That's a nifty suit, does it come in a non-battle damage variant."
"Okay, hoodie cape," Was his snarkier rebuttal. "Maybe those of us that don't patch together can comment on the other's outfits."
Before I could try my hand at any sort of comeback, I heard some yell out; "Incoming!
"You guys hear that?" I asked them, not sure if it was just my enhanced hearing playing tricks with me or if someone had started to get closer to us in a way that would justify yelling that out… and it came from the ground.
Before anyone answered, suddenly the Hulk leaped onto the roof, Captain America held in his arms as the green giant cracked the rooftop under his feet due to the sudden application of force. I grinned, excitement rising at them both.
"Ah, the Team Leader is here!" I grinned savagely while pointing at Hulk, not Captain America. "You got a plan, big guy?"
The Hulk took a look around, his eyes glaring at us all. There was this oddly contemplative expression on the not-so-Jolly Green Giant's face, it was reminiscent of the expression Banner wore when he looked at the data on the Tesseract to find the thing earlier this day.
"Smash!" He screamed, beating his fists against his chest before throwing his hands towards the wormhole.
"Wise advi-" The Hulk rushed past me before I could finish, managing to knock me aside but not off my feet. Loki had a second of concern that flashed over his face before he found himself picked up by his left arm and leg and thrown towards the portal high above the sky.
"Nice shot," Stark remarked.
"Ehh," Barton replied, his hands framing the still flying Norse god as if to take a picture. "It's leaning off to the left a bit much."
I saw a flash of green envelop the man and he transformed into a rather large bird that I wasn't familiar with. It had a bit of an owlish look to it, with a hint of an eagle in the beak. Honestly, birds weren't my thing, except for that minor period of time that I wrote a story about groups at war named after birds, in 1st class.
He arrived back, but it didn't take long as he sorta just twisted in something that I could only describe as a spatial manner and appeared back to the rooftop, no longer a bird. I noticed that he had a scepter in one hand, Tesseract in the other. There was an air of smug ass that I couldn't help but want to quash.
So I grabbed it with a dose of Super Speed, leaving the trickster gaping at his hand before glaring at me.
"Was that truly necessary?" He groaned, giving me that separated expressions that I'd come to expect from
"I didn't want you to port out of here," I explained, throwing the artifact that normal humans apparently couldn't handle between my hands. "Saw you use it to get inside that barrier."
"I see Heimdal has gotten a rival in privacy invasion," He replied snidely, leaning on the scepter as if Loki needed it to stand up right. My eyes scanned his legs along the various visual spectrums I could see, finding that there were minor tears along his muscle tissue but nothing much else.
Hulk's got a hella grip I guess.
My mind suddenly shifted towards the glowing cube in my hand. I could feel the power of it, it felt like I was holding a rather hot spoon. But with the added sense of having drunk several cans of Red Bull energy drinks.
Loki had used it twice now, just to teleport from one to another.
"How does the Tesseract work?" I asked Loki with a grin.
(SHIELD Helicarrier; Nick Fury)
"Director Fury, the council has made a decision." One of the many annoying talking heads that regularly bothered him commanded. It wasn't usually too big of a problem, Fury would mainly find some way of following the letter but not the spirit. "We expect you to follow it."
"I recognize the council has made a decision," Fury replied, his cool but with bite. "But given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it."
"Director," A different member of the World Security Council spoke up. "You're closer than any of our subs, you could scramble that jet… "
The Council member let the sentence hang as if it would tempt Fury into obeying the command by phrasing it without mentioning the key factor.
"That is the island of Manhattan," Fury glared at the two members pushing the hardest. They weren't all for it, just the majority of them were. Alexander Pierce, as an example, may have agreed with the action in principle but had actually agreed with Fury that it was much too soon to commit to it. But was outvoted. "Until I'm certain my team can't hold it, I will not order a nuclear strike against a civilian population."
"If we can't hold them in the-"
"This is no longer an invading army," He interrupted this remark before it could go off the ground. "We're dealing with a single individual using drones. Brainiac's got no interest in conquering Earth. Our intel ensures us that it is only New York that he'll have interest in for now. My team can repel him easily."
"His key interest in New York is exactly why we must deny him it."
"His key interest New York is exactly why we mustn't," Fury's mind thought of what he knew about Brainiac, then compared to the reports that were currently written up, the lie that he spoke next came easy; "That city goes up in flames, Earth could be next."
There was a certain sense of pride that Fury felt in how that finally forced them to shut up. It had worked so well that they didn't stop him from ending the call. As he exited the room, Hill was there waiting for him in the hall, tablet in hand as she scoured through the data on their units backing up the Avengers on site.
"They're looking good," She started to fill him in on the recent developments. "Lugh has cleaned up a large portion of the drones, our people are managing to kill any of the remaining ones with the Phase 2 prototypes handedly, and the drones have stopped teleporting in."
Fury was more glad than ever that he hadn't listened to that command. They'd almost completely shut down Brainiac's forces and they wanted to nuke New York. It had been way too early in the conflict to use last resorts like nukes.
"And the portal?"
"Good news, the machine stabilizing the portal has been destroyed."
"Bad news?"
"Portal is still open, and being held open on the other side now."
Fury merely nodded to this, it was to be expected that there would be some hold-ups in a messy situation like this. Mythological Gods, Alien boogeyman popping out of nowhere, the Director wondered where the threats against Humanity would end?
Would there be Greek Gods striking against Lisbon? Embodiments of modern-day ideas of industry fighting against the old myths of Britain?
In any case, Fury didn't worry about it too much. He had plans for every situation after all. And an emergency contact just waiting to be summoned.
"Make sure to lock down the flight deck," Fury ordered Hill. "I don't want anyone to get any secret messages from a Council member and blaze off to nuke New York anytime soon."
(New York: Pat Doyle)
"This is a horrible idea," Louise said in response to my plan, ignoring her we started to huddle around Loki. She wasn't part of the 'we' here, instead she stood several feet away from us, as in myself, Rogers, Hulk, Barton, Morse, and Loki.
"But it is an idea," I returned easily. "Something which no one else has had so far."
The rest of us would stay behind to face whatever drones that Brainiac sent this way. Stark was almost brought along, but it was decided that both he and Thor needed to stay behind to provide air support that someone like the Hulk couldn't. Loki then needed to come with us as he was the most likely to understand how to disable the technology inside the ship after Thor and Stark.
I wasn't going to bring Louise inside an alien ship, not if she wasn't wearing a super version of the Iron Man suit designed to be actually Invincible. Even then I'd think she was too squishy. Not that I particularly thought Morse and Barton would die, given their same squishy level, only they were super spies and she was a normal girl.
Not really in the same league as the blind Lawyer even, he at least had years of specialized combat training. Louise had a few years of high school wrestling and boxing… I think?
Loki took over my attention soon enough, his hands gently taking the Tesseract from me.
"Now, once we're in we won't have a second before Brainiac's on us," Loki started. "We're talking deathrays, drones made from denser materials and therefore won't just break apart at the slightest touch. We're talking about shielding systems that will trap us between two barriers that will slowly inch together till our bodies start to compress into thinner profiles. The-"
Loki went on to describe the dangers we could face in several different manners and how such technologies could be used to create brutal torture to break our characters. Not really in character for the City Bottling Alien, but it was a disturbing look into how Loki thought about things.
Definitely making sure that we imprison him… with regular psyche visits.
Even Romanoff, a woman who knew more about breaking people than I could even have nightmares about, seemed to be taken back by the rather maniac zeal that Loki was talking with. So much so that the Russian threw Thor a look but the blond man had the same expression as a goose discovering that he had no wings suddenly in the middle of his flight.
"Loki… are you feeling well?" Thor asked his brother.
"Yes, brother," Loki rolled his eyes while the Tesseract suddenly glowed brighter. "I'm fine. Now to take part in a suicide mission to save the pitiful race that I was just trying to conquer, surrounded by a monster that I threw off a flying ship, an agent that I had mind-controlled, all looking for an excuse to kill me. I'm super dandy Thor, thanks for finally asking."
As we disappeared, at the same time more drones finally started to be teleported in, Thor's reply rang in our ears.
"That's certainly an improvement at least from the last time he was 'fine'."
Author's Note: Hello, shorter chapter than usual for this. Hoping that going for the whole "shorter chapter" thing will help me gain more momentum overall for my writing. Get back on my earlier game!
Anyway, till next time!