**Chapter 190. A Rain of Chitauri Soldiers**
The sky was no longer a part of the Earth. The violet rift had expanded with such violent speed that it seemed to swallow the horizon itself, casting a sickly, bruised light over the canyons of New York. Below, the thousands of people who had been huddled in subways or frozen in the middle of gridlocked streets looked up, and for the first time, the true scale of their extinction became visible.
As the first wave of Leviathans—monstrous, serpentine bio-ships the size of cathedrals—slithered through the threshold, the veil behind them parted. The citizens of Earth stared into the abyss of deep space, where a colossal, skeletal armada waited in the cold dark. Thousands of black motes swarmed around the capital ships like carrion flies, and as they drew closer, the realization set in: every single mote was another Leviathan, another carrier of death.
Terror is a quiet thing until it becomes a scream. The roar of the emerging beasts was a physical pressure, a low-frequency vibration that shattered windows and rattled teeth. The giant creatures didn't just fly; they swam through the air, their armored plates grinding together with the sound of tectonic plates shifting.
Corvus Glaive, perched precariously on the retreating Chitauri craft, clutched the wounded Proxima Midnight to his chest. He looked back down at the shimmering towers of the city, his face twisted in a mask of genocidal hatred. The humans had dared to extinguish the beam, but in their ignorance, they had only widened the door. The flagship might be too vast to pass through this needle's eye, but the rest of the hive was ready to feast.
"Bring them all!" Corvus spat into his communicator, his voice a jagged edge of command reaching across the vacuum to the Chitauri high command. "Flood this wretched hive! Show these gnats the true meaning of power! Let them witness the majesty of the Great Thanos! Unleash the Leviathans—I want a carpet of fire from sea to sea!"
The order propagated through the hive-mind with terrifying efficiency. The armada surged. Even the flagship, a vessel of such impossible dimensions it could have eclipsed a moon, banked toward the rift, its heavy batteries glowing with the fire of distant stars. It wouldn't fit, but it didn't need to; its long-range cannons could still spit death through the hole in reality.
The Leviathans in the vanguard tilted their massive heads, their bioluminescent eyes glowing a predatory gold. Beneath their lower jaws, heavy organic-mechanical housings slid open, revealing cannons that hummed with a gathering storm of plasma. Blue beams began to rain down, not in scattered shots, but in a torrential downpour of destruction.
It was a scene of carnage that mirrored the darkest prophecies of the end-times.
The sapphire fire lashed the city. Stark Tower, the tallest spire in the vicinity, took the brunt of the initial volley. An energy pulse slammed into the upper viewing deck, the explosion blooming like a flower of fire and twisted steel. The building, already strained by the portal's initial birth, groaned under the new assault, glass raining down on the streets below like a million diamond daggers.
"Oh, come on!" Tony yelled, his heart sinking as he watched his legacy crumble in real-time. "That was brand new! Do you have any idea how much the insurance premium on a superhero headquarters is?"
He banked hard, preparing to dive into the fray, but he was forced to hover in stunned silence. The rain of blue fire didn't hit the ground. Suddenly, as if hitting an invisible, swirling ceiling, the beams began to bend. They swirled in mid-air, caught in a titanic atmospheric disturbance that looked like a localized hurricane of golden light.
"What is that...? A localized weather front?" Tony scanned the anomaly, his HUD struggling to track the shifting pressures. "Is that... wind?"
High atop the ruined precipice of the tower, a lone figure stood against the gale. It was Noah. His coat snapped in the wind, and his eyes were fixed on the heavens. His hands were raised, fingers splayed as if he were conducting a symphony of the elements.
This was no mere breeze. This was the **[Winds of Watoomb]**, an ancient, high-tier spell from the sanctums of Kamar-Taj. In another timeline, a Sorcerer Supreme would use this to hold back the weight of the sea, but Noah, whose soul was already attuned to the song of the wind, channeled it with a terrifying, refined precision. He didn't just block the energy; he consumed it.
The magical vortex expanded, a shimmering wall of air that swallowed the Chitauri plasma and spun it into a concentrated disk of destruction. With a sharp, outward thrust of his arms, Noah released the energy. The stolen fire roared back toward the sky, accelerated by the gale. The Leviathans, too massive to dodge, were caught in the backwash of their own weaponry. The return strike was twice as fast and ten times as lethal.
Fire erupted across the sky as nearly half of the lead Leviathans were vaporized, their armored carapaces shattering into molten slag. But the Chitauri knew no fear. For every beast that fell, two more took its place. They began to disgorge their cargo—thousands of foot soldiers, leaping from the sides of the Leviathans like fleas from a dying dog.
The rain of fire was replaced by a rain of soldiers. They fell in a dark, skittering cloud. As they hit the terminal velocity, they deployed gravitational anchors, slamming into the sides of skyscrapers and digging their metal talons into the stone. They crawled down the glass like insects, their rifles already spitting fire at the soldiers and civilians below.
"Coulson! Where is the damn cavalry?!" Nick Fury shouted, crouching behind a makeshift barricade of overturned taxis and police cruisers. He fired his pistol with grim efficiency, dropping a Chitauri soldier that had just vaulted over a bus.
"The National Guard is scrambling, and the nearest air wings are en route, but they're still thirty minutes out!" Coulson yelled back, his voice barely audible over the chatter of gunfire and the scream of the wind.
"Thirty minutes? We'll be a crater in thirty minutes!" Fury slammed a fresh magazine into his weapon. "Tell the Air Force to forget the formation—get every bird with a missile over this airspace *now*!"
High above, Noah didn't bother with the foot soldiers. He left the "ants" to the heroes on the ground. His gaze was fixed on the Leviathans, his silhouette a sharp contrast to the chaos. But he wasn't alone anymore.
On the ground floor of Stark Tower, the heavy security doors hissed open. A girl stepped out into the war zone, her presence as jarring as a splash of color in a grey world. Gwen carried a pair of oversized, cerulean scissors on her shoulder, her blue twin-tails bouncing despite the gloom. Behind her, the air shimmered with the cold, mechanical light of progress.
PROJECT: Warwick emerged with a low, predatory growl, his cybernetic eyes scanning the heat signatures of the invaders. Beside him, the towering form of Blitzcrank stood ready, his armor gleaming with a new, regal gold-and-white finish. And behind them followed a silent, disciplined legion of iBlitzcrank nanobots, their sensors synchronized into a single, deadly hive-mind.
Noah's secret army had finally arrived to claim the streets.
--------
You can read up to 200+ advanced chapters and support me at patreon.com/raaaaven
Daily +2 chapters updates