Tony's targeting system locked onto Barton's position before the smoke from the explosion had fully cleared. He swung his palm cannon and fired.
The blast caught Barton mid-reload and threw him backward into the rooftop wall. He hit it hard and slid down and didn't get up.
Tony turned back to the roof just in time to watch the Tesseract housing complete whatever Selvig had spent months calibrating it to do.
The blue light that erupted from the top of Stark Tower was not subtle. It punched straight up, and where it punched, the sky tore open — a portal that kept expanding as he watched, the aperture widening against the blue Manhattan afternoon until it was large enough to frame the darkness of space beyond it.
Through the opening, the Chitauri army was already moving.
The flying infantry came first, small and fast, their hoverbikes weaving through the portal mouth in tight formation. Behind them, something vastly larger pushed through — the Leviathans, organic transports that blocked out meaningful sections of sky, their flanks splitting to release soldiers in cascading streams.
Tony's HUD filled with threat markers from edge to edge.
"The army is really coming," he murmured.
He stopped thinking about Loki. Stopped thinking about the device on the roof. He went straight at the army.
The shoulder housings of his armor retracted and revealed the missile racks beneath.
Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.
The micromissiles launched in continuous sequence, each one threading upward toward the Chitauri scouts pouring through the portal's lower edge.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Nearly a hundred missiles flew out. Each one took a soldier. His palm cannons kept firing between launches, filling the gaps in the coverage pattern. It was a lot of firepower applied very fast.
It wasn't close to enough.
Ivan Vanko came in from the south, shoulder cannons cycling, plasma whip carving wide arcs through infantry formations. Across the street, the warehouse bay on the roof of Vanko Industries opened and a squadron of unmanned Blue Dynamo frames launched in tight sequence, spreading across the midtown airspace to form a secondary line.
Between the two of them and the drone frames, they were handling a fraction of what was coming through the portal. The rest slipped past their coverage and spread outward — flying infantry fanning across the skyline, banking between towers, beginning to range over the streets below.
A Chitauri Leviathan banked hard and clipped both of them simultaneously. Tony went spinning through open air and fired his stabilizers to correct. Ivan tumbled alongside him and recovered his own bearing. Below them, on the streets, the Chitauri soldiers who had made it through the perimeter were firing their laser weapons indiscriminately at anything that moved. People ran in every direction, the sound of screaming audible even at altitude.
The portal kept expanding.
Smith and Thor arrived on the battlefield together.
Thor looked at the wave of infantry pouring from the portal mouth and didn't hesitate — he went straight at them with Mjolnir and the particular focused fury of a god of Asgard defending a world he had claimed as his own.
Smith held his position and watched.
He was looking for something specific. The battle around him was loud and immediate and full of legitimate demands on his attention, and he set all of it aside for fifteen seconds while he scanned. He was looking for the energy signature of a time traveler. Any Avenger from a future branch of the timeline who had come back to borrow Infinity Stones from this moment. Any indicator that this universe had already gone through Thanos's snap and was running a desperate correction.
He found nothing.
Then a voice reached him through the noise of the battle.
"Guardian of the Dragon Balls. What are you looking for?"
Smith turned. The Ancient One was on a nearby building's balcony, standing with the unhurried calm of someone who had arrived early and was watching everything. Her eyes were on the portal.
Smith flew to her.
"Master Ancient One." He inclined his head. "Hello."
"You haven't answered my question," she said.
Smith looked at the battlefield below them — at the Chitauri infantry spreading across the midtown grid, at the Leviathans banking between skyscrapers, at the various enhanced individuals now converging on the engagement from multiple directions. "I was looking for anyone unexpected," he said. "It seems there isn't anyone."
In the original timeline's time heist, one of the convergence points had been the Ancient One's sanctum — the Hulk had appeared there, and her response had been the key that confirmed which branch of events Smith was navigating. The Hulk was present in this battle, but he hadn't appeared in the Ancient One's space. The absence of that specific interaction, combined with everything else Smith had checked, pointed toward a clear conclusion: in this universe, the snap had not yet occurred as a fixed future event.
Which changed what needed protecting and how urgently it needed protecting.
"What brings you here?" Smith asked.
The Ancient One looked up at the portal's edge. "I want to make sure the outcome is one we can live with." A pause. "Someone may try to use this opening while it exists. I'm here to ensure they find that more difficult than expected."
She had positioned herself to watch the portal's far side — to see if anything came through that wasn't Chitauri. Thanos, reading the resonance of three Infinity Stones gathered in one place, might find this moment tempting. If he did, he would find the Ancient One already there.
While they spoke, the Paragons hit the streets below.
Selene moved through Chitauri infantry at a speed that made individual movements invisible — the eye caught only the aftermath, soldiers dropping in sequence before anything nearby had registered the cause. The blade in her hand traced continuous arcs through the formations, clean and precise and utterly without hesitation.
Michael came in low in his hybrid form, the wolf-vampire synthesis moving through a lobby breach with the focused efficiency of something that had been built specifically for close-quarters lethality. He threw two soldiers through the glass frontage of a building and turned toward the next cluster without slowing.
Chen Haoran drew fire from the air around him and shaped it into directed streams, burning through Chitauri formations with surgical efficiency.
Wesley moved in the symbiote mode, the Severance enhancing his angles into something that didn't quite match normal human biomechanics — transitions between positions that covered distances his baseline body couldn't have managed, clearing targets with the focused attention of someone who had been very good at this before the enhancement and was considerably better now.
T'Challa and Shang-Chi worked the ground perimeter together — the vibranium suit absorbing kinetic impacts and redirecting them, the Dragon Energy cutting through Chitauri ground troops who had no reference point for what they were encountering.
From the streets and windows around them, people who had not yet evacuated shouted the names of the Paragons with the particular hoarseness of people who have been afraid for several minutes and have just found something to be grateful for instead.
Around the Paragons, the Fraternity's supernatural assets moved through the engagement in their own lanes. The werewolves and vampires had physical advantages that translated well in individual exchanges — the speed, the strength, the resilience. Against the Chitauri's numbers, those advantages were insufficient to prevent casualties. The army was too large and too distributed to fight on purely individual terms, and the laser weapons didn't care about regenerative capacity. The Fraternity's people took losses and kept moving.
Across the midtown rooftops, the Brotherhood's assassins had established firing positions with equipment that had no legitimate civilian application — sniper rifles, grenade launchers, rocket-propelled systems, direct-fire howitzers. They worked the sightlines with the professional discipline of people who had looked at the three-gold-coin bounty per kill and made a straightforward occupational decision.
In the residential blocks, the Baymax units were doing their own quiet work — moving through evacuation routes at speeds that contradicted their rounded, unthreatening appearance, picking up the elderly and the injured and the people who couldn't run and carrying them clear of the engagement. Several Baymax units had been destroyed by Chitauri laser fire. The remaining ones kept moving.
On Stark Tower's rooftop terrace, Loki stood with the Mind Scepter in hand and watched his army come through the portal with his arms open at his sides, his face turned upward toward the sky he intended to own. The Chitauri soldiers flowing over the city below were the beginning of something. The Dragon Balls, once he found them, would consolidate what came after. He would make a wish to the dragon, and everything that came next would be on his terms.
Thor landed on the terrace.
"Loki." His voice was hard. "Turn off the Tesseract. Or I will destroy it."
Loki looked at his brother and felt the particular irritation of someone watching a person they know well arrive at the wrong moment. "You can't destroy it."
"You can't stop this now," he continued. "There is only war."
Thor looked at him steadily. "Then come on."
Loki brought the scepter up and they went at each other across the length of the terrace — two Asgardians who had grown up fighting each other and knew every pattern the other carried. They traded for a sustained exchange and reached a hard stalemate, neither able to pull decisively ahead.
On the other side of the skyline, Tony assessed the three Leviathans now active in the midtown airspace and ran the numbers. They were not negligible threats.
"JARVIS. Where is Smith?"
"On a balcony, sir. North face of the adjacent building."
Tony was briefly confused but had too much incoming to pursue the question. His comm crackled.
"Stark." Natasha's voice. "We're at your three o'clock, heading northeast."
Tony banked hard and pulled his targeting away from the nearest infantry cluster. "What took you so long? Were you getting takeout?" He adjusted his vector. "Go to Park Avenue — I'll lure them over and make them your targets."
He went low over the avenue and drew the nearest Chitauri formation behind him. Natasha swung the Quinjet into position and the onboard machine gun opened up, taking several down in a single pass.
JARVIS flagged additional incoming from the eastern approach.
Tony broke off and went to meet them. Ivan Vanko's unmanned armor brigade had successfully intercepted one of the three Leviathans — plasma whips and missiles working the creature's underside in coordinated passes — but the other two were unchallenged. Both of them banked over the residential blocks to the east and their abdominal hatches opened.
Soldiers ejected in mass numbers from both sides. They hit the building faces and grabbed on, moving fast up the exterior surfaces, and where they found windows they broke through and went inside. The sounds that followed from the affected buildings were not good sounds. The only people who made it out of those floors without injury were the ones whose Baymax units were fast enough to reach them before the Chitauri did.
Natasha spotted the Loki-Thor engagement on Stark Tower's roof and changed her attack vector. She lined up a strafing approach and had just committed to it when Loki glanced sideways at her Quinjet and fired.
The scepter's energy beam clipped the Quinjet's portside engine. Natasha had the aircraft in a controlled descent before the damage finished registering — the kind of emergency response that only works when the pilot has been training for this specific category of failure for years. The Quinjet hit the avenue in a forced landing that was ugly but survivable.
The rear hatch opened. Rogers, Jones, and Banner came out at a run.
Rogers and Jones went straight into the nearest engagement without discussion.
Banner stood in the street and looked up at the Leviathan banking overhead. Its scale was visible from street level in a way that aerial footage didn't fully communicate. It was enormous. It was organic. It was heading toward the residential grid with the unhurried momentum of something that had not yet encountered a reason to hurry.
Banner looked at it.
"Now's the time to get angry," he said, to himself or to the Hulk or to the general situation.
Then he changed.
The Hulk hit the street and went at the nearest engagement at a dead sprint.
On the rooftop, the fight between Thor and Loki had moved to the terrace's edge.
Loki got the scepter under Thor's chin and used the leverage to drive him back against the railing, bending him over it, the city visible two thousand feet below.
The lightning came down from a clear sky — Thor calling it with pure will, the strike cracking into Loki and blasting him loose. Thor came off the railing, rolled, and brought Mjolnir around.
The hammer connected.
Thor stood over his brother and breathed hard. "Do you know what our father and I went through to bring you back? How much effort we spent?"
Something moved across Loki's face. Something that wasn't entirely composed. "I heard about it," he said, and his voice was flat over whatever was underneath it. "One defeat after another."
Thor looked out at the city below — at the smoke, the running figures, the Leviathans banking between towers, the fires starting on several blocks. "Look at this," he said. "Look at what you're doing. Do you think becoming king ends it? Do you think after this, the madness stops?"
Loki looked at the city. He looked at it for a genuine moment.
"It's too late," he said, and something in his voice was quieter than his words. "It's too late to stop this."
Thor grabbed his arm. "No. Not if we do this together."
Loki looked at Thor. His expression had shifted into something that was reaching toward honest, something that was working its way toward whatever was underneath the prince and the conqueror and the trickster.
The dagger appeared in his hand.
He put it between Thor's armor plates, into his side, and stepped back.
Thor went down on one knee. Mjolnir hit the roof.
Loki looked at him. "Still so trusting," he said softly.
Then Thor stood back up.
He kicked Loki across the full width of the terrace. He closed the distance and got both hands on him and drove him into the rooftop surface twice, hard, before releasing him.
Loki lay there for a moment. Then he caught a passing Chitauri skiff with one hand and pulled himself onto it, leaving the Mind Scepter where it had fallen on the roof. The skiff carried him out over the city and he shrank to a point and disappeared into the smoke.
Thor watched the space where his brother had been. Then he turned and launched himself into the battle, hammer swinging, lightning gathering in the clouds overhead.
A Chitauri frigate pushed through the portal.
It was four times the scale of any Leviathan — a capital ship that appeared above the Manhattan skyline like a moving storm front, its shadow covering several city blocks simultaneously. The portal had expanded enough to accommodate it. It floated in the air with the slow, deliberate presence of something that had never needed to hurry.
Rogers and Natasha and Jessica Jones had just finished clearing a street-level breach when all three of them looked up at it.
"Oh, God," Rogers said. "Here comes a bigger one."
Smith said his goodbye to the Ancient One and dropped from the balcony into the battle.
He looked up at the frigate. Looked at its shielding configuration. Looked at the angle.
He brought both hands forward, palms together at his side.
"KAME..."
"HAME…"
"HAAAAAA!!!!"
The beam that came from his hands was thick and white and crossed the distance to the frigate's forward section in a fraction of a second. It punched through the shielding without slowing. The detonation was internal and immediate.
The Chitauri frigate came apart in the air — a cascade of secondary explosions working outward from the initial breach point, the whole structure breaking into pieces that spread across the sky before gravity began to assert itself. Natasha was already steering the damaged Quinjet clear of the debris field. The fireball that the frigate left behind was visible from the Helicarrier.
From across the skyline, Tony watched it and said, "Good job, Smith."
Thor, not to be outdone, climbed to altitude above the portal mouth and summoned everything available to him — every amp of lightning that the New York sky could produce, channeled through Mjolnir in a single focused strike. A Leviathan that had been making a run at the eastern residential blocks came apart in midair, its momentum carrying the pieces over the buildings rather than into them.
The Hulk had found his own Leviathan by this point and had resolved the tactical problem with both hands, tearing into the creature's underside from below with the systematic focus of something that had decided this particular problem was actually satisfying.
Smith dealt with the infantry. He fired Ki blast after Ki blast in rapid sequence, each one threading through the aerial formations and finding its mark. The efficiency bothered him — one soldier per blast was too slow against what was still coming through.
He flew toward the portal's base.
At the bottom of the column, where the dimensional opening was narrowest and the Chitauri were funneling through in their densest concentration, Smith let his ki surge.
The pressure expanded outward from him in a wave.
The Chitauri soldiers who had just cleared the portal mouth dropped from the air all at once — not dramatically, just suddenly no longer functional, falling like things that had lost whatever was holding them up. They hit the streets and the building faces and the Quinjet's crumpled fuselage and they didn't get back up.
On the Helicarrier, Fury watched sixteen screens simultaneously.
The feeds were coming from every available source — camera drones, news helicopters, traffic systems, satellite downlinks. Every angle of the Manhattan engagement was visible somewhere on the array. He stood in front of them and did not sit down.
The enhanced individuals were performing beyond any model his analysts had built. Smith Doyle's direct output had just reduced a capital ship to debris in one exchange. The math was still difficult — the portal was open, the Chitauri were still coming — but the engagement's scope was contained.
Hill appeared at his shoulder. "Director. Security Council has video access. They're requesting your immediate presence in the conference room."
Fury nodded. "On my way."
The Security Council members filled the LCD screens in their respective configurations. The senior representative spoke first.
"The Avengers have managed to control the scope of the battle so far. We want to acknowledge that." A pause that was not actually a pause. "However. We are asking you to prepare for the worst case — in the event that the Avengers and the extraordinary individuals participating in this engagement are unable to maintain containment of the Chitauri force, we are requesting authorization for a tactical nuclear strike on the portal coordinates above New York."
Councillor A said, "I agree with this proposal."
Councillor B said, "I agree with this proposal."
Councillor C said, "I agree with this proposal."
The American representative was silent for several seconds. Then: "I agree with this proposal."
The proposing representative looked at the consensus on his screen. "Very good. Since this is the agreed position, Director Fury should begin preparing the authorization. If the situation cannot be managed by conventional enhanced response, we expect execution without delay."
The Avengers and their allies had performed well enough that the Council was willing to give them the opportunity. The nuclear option was a contingency. Fury agreed to it on those terms.
He walked back out to the operations floor.
On the battlefield below the Helicarrier's position, Smith glanced up through the portal's column of light.
Through the aperture, past the soldiers still cycling through it, past the Leviathans still maneuvering in the midtown airspace, the Chitauri mothership was visible in the void beyond — enormous, dark, hanging in space with the patience of something that had an essentially limitless supply of what it was sending.
Smith looked at it and thought.
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