The bolt guns never stopped.
The Astartes guards moved through the city streets in the particular way of people who have learned that cover is useful but not sacred: using vehicles and building corners as they presented themselves, never staying behind any one position long enough for the angle to be solved, always pressing forward toward the hills where the fortress sat dark and massive against the night sky. The Hydra soldiers coming down from those hills and out of the city's side streets were well-equipped and disciplined by any mortal standard, and by any mortal standard the exchange of fire was completely one-sided.
Tyberos was not using the streets.
He had found a Hydra heavy tank that had positioned itself across an intersection and settled the matter by hitting it from the side at a dead run, ceramite shoulder leading, the kinetic transfer of a Terminator in full acceleration expressing itself through the tank's hull in ways the vehicle's designers had not accounted for. The tank rolled. Tyberos kept moving.
The single-person tanks that the city streets were cluttered with had been dealt with in the approach: the lightning claws had taken most of them apart at their thinnest structural points, which on a Hydra single-person tank were most of the structural points. The smouldering wrecks were serving as incidental cover now for the guards working up behind him.
The overturned heavy tank was not finished. Its cannon was still tracking, the crew inside battered but functional, and Tyberos stopped, read the angle, and drove both lightning claws through the hull underside with the same systematic attention he applied to every obstacle. The chassis gave way section by section, and the crew inside became visible through the gap, faces marked by the inside of an armoured vehicle that had been forcibly opened from the outside. They were not in good condition.
The armour-piercing shell came from down the street.
It was a heavy-calibre round from another tank that had been adjusting its firing solution for the last thirty seconds, waiting for a gap in the visual obstruction that the burning wrecks had been providing. The shot was well-placed: centre-mass on the most prominent target in the engagement zone, which was Tyberos, who was approximately three metres tall and currently standing in the middle of a street.
It did not hit centre-mass. Whether it was the particular angle of Tyberos's swing as he pulled the lightning claw free, or something that the Emperor or chance or pure physics decided in that fraction of a second, the round struck the thick ceramite of the shoulder pauldron at an angle that deflected it instead of stopping it. It carved a crater across the shoulder plating in a screech of stressed metal and then the deflection carried it sideways, through the wall of the nearest building, through several subsequent walls, and then out the far side and into the dark.
Tyberos stood still for a moment.
A sound came from beneath the helmet. Not words. More the sound a person makes when something has happened that warrants acknowledgement but does not warrant stopping.
He turned toward the tank that had fired, which was now frantically trying to traverse its turret for a second shot, and began moving toward it using the overturned tank behind him and the burning vehicles along the street's edge as partial concealment. His pace was not hurried. It did not need to be.
The Hydra crews inside the fortress were going to find, over the next several minutes, that they had made Tyberos angry, and that this was a specific and significant condition distinct from his normal operational state.
Thor came down out of the sky trailing lightning.
The bolt struck the street ahead of him and the arc that spread from it found the nearest cluster of Hydra elite soldiers and moved through them with the cheerful indiscriminacy of electricity in a wet environment. He landed at the far end of the arc's path, hammer already moving, and sent the next group of soldiers he reached into the adjacent buildings at a speed that precluded soft landings.
He stopped for half a breath, chest working, and felt the familiar drain of sustained lightning-calling on his reserves. The thunder needed feeding. He gave it a moment and then started again, Mjolnir spinning up to the speed where it became a blur rather than a visible object, and he moved along the street in a low sweep that cleared the path ahead of the remaining civilians still filtering toward the evacuation corridors.
Tony was working the air, the Iron Legion split between civilian-moving and soldier-suppressing, Jarvis coordinating the transition between the two tasks in real time with the particular efficiency of a system that did not need to think about it. The shock beams from the higher units were placing with the kind of accuracy that made Tony occasionally feel that Jarvis was showing off, finding soldiers who had barely finished the motion of raising their weapons before the beam resolved the situation.
Tony himself had come back down to street level. He had moved a lot of civilians in the last twenty minutes, enough that the density of non-combatants in the immediate engagement zone had dropped from a serious problem to a manageable one, and the Iron Legion could handle the remainder. He wanted to be in the fight.
He landed heavily, the asphalt beneath his feet registering its objection in a network of cracks, and Jarvis's display was already highlighting targets before the impact fully settled. An elite soldier to the left, energy weapon raised. Tony read the movement through the visor's predictive overlay and threw a punch that covered the distance between them in a way that the soldier had not fully processed before it arrived.
The soldier's trajectory after contact described a long, low arc that ended against a wall some distance away.
"That got to hurt," Tony said, to no one in particular, because he had found that narrating his own combat kept the part of his brain that wanted to think about the larger implications of what he was doing productively occupied. He raised his palm and began working through the line of soldiers emerging from the building across the street, shock beams placed with Jarvis's assistance at intervals that were efficient rather than showy.
"Tony!" Thor was back in the air, the electric corona around him casting moving light across the street below, dazzling and cold. "The civilian evacuation, how is it progressing?!"
"Most are clear! Jarvis is still scanning for stragglers!" Tony tilted his angle of fire slightly to catch a soldier who had shifted behind a vehicle. "The Legion's handling the last of them!"
"Good! Then we can"
"Thor! Get down!"
Jarvis had flagged it in the same moment Tony's eyes caught the data: an armour-piercing shell with a rifled tip, energy-assisted propellant, the scarlet trace of its drive mechanism cutting a visible line through the air from some hidden launch point among the buildings. Not coming from the front. Coming from the side, through the gap between two structures, aimed at the back of Thor's position.
Thor heard the warning and turned.
The shell hit him in the back.
The explosion that followed was not small. It used the energy of the round and whatever secondary reaction the shell was designed to produce, and it produced it comprehensively, the fire expanding outward in a sphere that swallowed Thor entirely and sent a pressure wave down the street that rattled windows in their frames for half a block in every direction.
When the fire cleared, Thor was not standing.
The building across the street had acquired a Thor-shaped impact on its upper face. Below it, in the rubble, something was moving. Slowly.
Tony was already in the air.
"David!" He was transmitting at full output, not caring about communications discipline. "Thor is down and needs medical assessment! I repeat, Thor is down and needs medical assessment!"
He dove toward the impact point, shoulder-checking a pair of laser beams that would have complicated his approach, and hit the rubble line in a controlled crash that cleared the loose debris from the area around the moving shape.
Fifty metres away, in a room that had been dark until the explosion lit the building's windows from the outside, a slender hand fell back to its owner's side. The scarlet energy that had been gathering at the fingertips dissipated into the air without completing whatever it had been building toward.
Another hand caught the slender wrist. Rougher skin. A grip that was not rough, but was firm.
"Wanda." The voice was low, controlled, the kind of controlled that only barely was. "What did you just do?"
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