"The invaders are in uncharted territory, but they seem surprisingly familiar with Earth. If they know exactly how much combat power we can muster against these monsters, then the more monsters they deploy to different regions, the harder it will be for the Sword of God Bureau to contain the destruction. After all, Earth's superheroes and fighting forces are limited in number."
"The better they understand this, the more likely they are to strike across different oceans. And wherever that unknown spatial wormhole appears next, it will almost certainly show up in someone else's waters. That would force Earth's superheroes into a constant state of scrambling from one crisis to another. If an especially difficult monster emerges, even the safety of the superheroes themselves could be threatened."
By this point, Coulson—dressed in a full suit alongside Fury and the others—found his shirt soaked through with sweat beneath his black jacket, despite the chilly spring air.
There was no denying it: Zoddhiss's analysis was highly plausible. He was a thinker, the kind who would identify his enemy's weaknesses and craft a plan to exploit them. But this was precisely the kind of scenario that no defending side ever wanted to see unfold.
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"Of course, there's a second possibility," Zodd said suddenly, smiling. "The invaders are idiots. They think this alone is enough to destroy Earth, so they foolishly cancel the wormhole and stop deploying more monsters."
Fury and the others would never buy into that second possibility. Only a fool pins his hopes on the enemy being a fool.
The monster army under Thanos's command. The creatures' creators. Those aliens who called themselves the Precursors—they followed.
"I never imagined Lord Thanos would take such a personal interest in this tiny planet."
One of the Precursors spoke in their unique tongue.
This time, Thanos had ordered them to raze Earth and, incidentally, to find an Asgardian named Loki and eliminate him.
It seemed he held considerable faith in the Precursors' capabilities.
"We must not underestimate this Earth."
Another Precursor tightened its breathing apparatus before speaking.
Two monsters had already been buried here. Who could have guessed that a civilization which hadn't even ventured beyond its own star system would possess such terrifying weaponry? The energy magnitude of that crimson death-light descending from the sky was powerful enough to chill the Precursors to the bone.
But it also revealed something to them—the long interval between the destruction of those two monsters suggested this weapon couldn't be deployed at will.
And so now they were releasing six monsters at once, pushing them out in different directions.
These creatures might roll off an assembly line, with larger numbers requiring nothing more than a little extra time to incubate. There was no question that while Thanos's fleet classified these monsters as high-grade cannon fodder, on a low-tier civilization like Earth, even a single one could wreak catastrophic havoc.
And when monsters were deployed simultaneously in substantial numbers, it was obvious that humanity could not withstand such an overwhelming invasion.
The Precursor civilization had already used these monsters to annihilate multiple civilizations and had accumulated vast experience in doing so.
What's more, they had obtained intelligence on Earth from the failed Chitauri invasion. They knew this world had formidable super-soldiers—"superheroes"—who had caused the Chitauri to break their blades and suffer defeat.
No matter. No matter how powerful a super-soldier was, as long as they couldn't single-handedly match a starship, there were countless ways to deal with them.
What baffled them even more was that these superheroes would fight tooth and nail to save their weak and feeble kin—when their own individual value far surpassed everything else. A civilization possessing a large number of super-soldiers could leap to the top ranks of the cosmos overnight.
That was a value millions of weak kin could never repay!
As the Precursors established new spatial wormholes, the six simultaneously deployed monsters advanced in six different directions. The Precursors had learned from their earlier failures, and when cultivating this batch of monsters, they had specifically enhanced their movement speed.
Unlike Axe-Head and Blade-Head, which could only trudge along the deep-sea floor, this batch knew how to swim!
The objective was to escalate the chaos—to split apart the main fighting force of the apparently limited superheroes. So every military warship and submarine encountered along the way was destroyed on command. As for coastal cities near the Pacific, towering, churning waves caused by the monsters' advance were already visible on the horizon.
"If the Sword of Damocles isn't enough to handle this, then we'll use something even stronger."
Zodd's words had barely faded when the screen before them was consumed by an unnaturally brilliant light. More than ten full seconds passed before the dazzling golden radiance finally receded—and what emerged from it made Black Widow's pupils widen involuntarily.
"What the hell is that? Where did it come from?"
"Wh-what is that thing?!"
It resembled a certain legendary dish that often appeared on British dinner tables. Fury's eyes, at that moment, looked exactly like the unblinking, dead-fish stare of the dish's main ingredient—bulging so far they nearly popped out of their sockets. His expression was one of pure shock, and for good reason: what filled his vision was a pure-white vessel, its hull shaped like a ship-splitting blade, slowly rising into the sky.
As the Sword of God Bureau personnel operated the satellite feed, the image gradually zoomed in. The pure-white warship's length became discernible—nearly three hundred meters, no smaller than the Helicarrier. As the footage panned further, the colossal cannon muzzles at the vessel's bow came into view. A numbing, scalp-tingling sensation surged through everyone present. Fury stood frozen in stunned disbelief, utterly unable to react.
"A—a warship?"
Everyone felt their scalps go numb.
Zoddhiss had just pulled out a floating warship?
And not some new Helicarrier variant—this thing was clearly built for space!
"What's there to be surprised about? The Saiyan Raditz invasion, the Chitauri invasion, the Shi'ar Empire alien invasion, and now this one. It'd be strange if I wasn't prepared. Right, Stark?"
Zodd @'d Tony Stark.
Stark's face darkened as he hung up the call.
What was that supposed to mean? Was he deliberately rubbing it in?
Sure, Stark had poured all his energy into upgrading his Iron Man suits, and he was confident he could build a warship like that too.
But still—he had lost to this guy. Again.
It was true. Earth had faced multiple alien invasions already. How had he never thought about this problem?
It wasn't a matter of vision or insight. It was the environment he'd grown up in.
America was a place that worshipped individual heroism. Raised in that culture and blessed with super-genius intellect, Stark had inevitably taken that philosophy to its extreme. A spaceship? Could it possibly be cooler than an Iron Man suit?
In the Bering Strait, a monster was about to break past the shallows and make landfall. Streams of water cascaded off its body. Its dinosaur-like form gradually fell within the targeting locks of naval cannons.
/-\
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