Chapter 196. The Fate of the Flagship
Above the jagged skyline of New York, the violet rift remained a wound in the heavens, a gateway that had birthed only nightmares. For hours, the citizens had watched in paralyzed terror as alien horrors spilled through that violet maw, threatening to extinguish the light of their world.
But now, a second phenomenon claimed the sky. A massive, circular gateway of sapphire blue opened directly in the path of the violet one. The people below stared up through the smoke and ash, their hearts heavy with a new brand of dread. Was this another wave? they wondered. Was a second invader coming to feast on the scraps left by the first? Mothers clutched their children tighter in the ruins, whispering prayers to gods that felt very far away.
They did not have to wait long for an answer.
From the throat of the violet portal, a torrential flood of energy erupted—the full, concentrated fury of the Chitauri fleet. These were beams designed to crack the crust of planets, a barrage that should have reduced Manhattan to a crater of cooling slag. But as the beams struck the sapphire gate, they didn't explode. They didn't even splash. They simply... vanished. It was as if the city had been granted a shield made of the void itself, a bottomless throat that drank the fire of the stars.
The Tesseract hummed in Noah's grip, its vibration harmonizing with the very atoms of his body. Across the bridge of space, aboard the command deck of the flagship, Corvus felt his blood run cold.
"Impossible..." he hissed, his grip tightening on his double-edged glaive. He watched the tactical displays in disbelief. "How can a mortal wield the Stone with such casual insolence?"
In the hierarchy of the cosmos, the Infinity Stones were the ultimate forbidden fruit. To touch them was to invite immediate disintegration, a soul-shattering end for any who lacked the divine constitution to house such power. Even the most formidable of beings usually required a medium—a vessel to dampen and channel the raw, reality-warping static. The Scepter of Mind, a masterpiece of dark engineering, had been crafted for exactly that purpose, allowing a wielder to bend the wills of others without being consumed by the intellect within the stone. But the Scepter had failed against the sheer will of these defenders.
The Tesseract was a container, yes, but a volatile one. It was a cage for a star, and the bars were often thin. Corvus remembered the records of the human "Red Skull"—a creature of ambition who had dared to grasp the cube during a battle with the First Avenger. The Stone had judged him, casting him across the galaxy to the desolate peaks of Vormir, where he now withered as a ghost-guardian of the Soul Stone.
The cube was not a toy for the weak. To someone like Nick Fury, it was a mystery to be peered at through a microscope, a battery for trinkets. But in the hands of one who knew the ancient tongue of the universe, it was a weapon of absolute geometry.
Corvus bit back a curse. He lacked the mastery to command the cube's spatial energy as he did his own blade. His flagship's ability to hold the portal open relied on external Kree technology and complex calculations. Had he the power to truly command the Tesseract, he would have vanished with it to the sanctuary of the Sanctuary II long ago.
But he was out of time for contemplation.
Through the violet portal, the Chitauri artillery continued its relentless rhythm. They poured fire into the sapphire gate like water into a drain. But where was that fire going?
Noah gave the Tesseract a sharp, mocking twist. The sapphire energy flared, bleeding into the emptiness of the void.
Thousands of miles away, in the silent, frozen reaches of space, the Chitauri flagship was still venting its fury. Its cannons glowed white-hot, nearly a third of its batteries beginning to cycle down as they exhausted their immediate power reserves. The crew was confident. Nothing could survive such a concentrated erasure.
Then, the void itself broke.
Directly alongside the massive vessel, a sapphire rift tore through the darkness. It was a mirror of the one over New York, and it grew with predatory speed until it loomed over a third of the ship's gargantuan hull.
"Cease fire! Evasive maneuvers!" Corvus screamed, the realization hitting him like a physical blow.
The flagship groaned as its massive thrusters attempted to kick into life, venting plumes of ion fire into the dark. It was a titan trying to turn in a bathtub. For all its terrifying speed once in motion, it was a prisoner of its own inertia.
The retreat was a fantasy. Noah had mapped the coordinates with lethal precision.
From the sapphire gate, the flagship's own energy returned home. The very beams they had fired moments ago—now amplified and focused by the Tesseract's transit—erupted from the rift.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The silence of space was shattered by a visual symphony of ruin. There was no air to carry the sound, but the shockwaves rippled through the hull of the flagship in a tectonic shudder. The Chitauri armor, designed to withstand the rigors of atmospheric entry and orbital bombardment, stood no chance against its own concentrated essence.
The hull buckled. Internal bulkheads shattered like glass, and the atmosphere of the ship whistled out into the vacuum, carrying with it the frozen corpses of the crew. The continuous stream of energy acted like a hot knife through butter, carving the flagship into glowing, jagged pieces.
The destruction did not stop there. The Leviathan escorts, caught in the proximity of the blast, were vaporized or torn apart by the shrapnel of their queen. They became nothing more than drifting, metallic husks in the cold graveyard of the stars.
As the last of the energy faded, the sapphire portal flickered and died. The flagship was no more.
And then, a strange, eerie quiet fell over the battlefield of New York.
One by one, the glowing, cybernetic joints of the Chitauri soldiers dimmed. The light in their eyes flickered out. They collapsed where they stood—on rooftops, in the streets, in the cockpits of their flyers. The great Leviathans, once terrifying sky-whales, suddenly lost their buoyancy and crashed into the buildings below like falling monuments of flesh and metal.
"What... what just happened?"
The question echoed through the Avengers' comms. From Captain America to the lowliest National Guardsman, they watched in stunned silence as the invincible army simply... died. It was as if a god had reached down and cut every string of every puppet in the city.
In the command center of the Helicarrier, Nick Fury allowed himself a single, ragged breath. He was about to declare a victory when the radio hissed with the frantic, terrified voice of Agent Maria Hill.
"Director! We have a breach! One of the Council's jets has launched without clearance! It's carrying a Mark 7 nuclear warhead, and its trajectory is locked on midtown Manhattan!"
Fury's face turned a dangerous shade of ashen. "Damn those fossils! Those arrogant, suicidal fools!"
"Hill, get through to the cockpit! Tell those bastards to abort! The battle is won! There is no threat left to sanitize!"
--------
You can read up to 200+ advanced chapters and support me at patreon.com/raaaaven
Daily +2 chapters updates