"I want to avenge my family."
The words came out through gritted teeth, low and hard. The girl's hands were shaking at her sides, the scarlet energy curling at her fingertips like something alive that had been startled, and she was pulling against her brother's grip with the controlled desperation of someone who understood why she was being held back and resented it anyway.
Pietro did not let go.
"Tony Stark deserves to answer for what his weapons did. I am not saying otherwise." He kept his voice even, close to her ear, the words precise rather than soothing. "But the others out there are not him. And Wanda, you know what happens when the ability runs past what you can hold. You felt it last time. We both did."
She stopped pulling. Not agreement: just the decision to stop.
Pietro's grip loosened slightly but did not release.
"Someone else has gone to deal with Hydra for us tonight. Our plan was never going to survive this kind of chaos unchanged. The city is in motion, there are soldiers everywhere, the streets are not ours. While everything is still moving, leaving is the right choice." He looked at her face until she looked back at him. "We need more time. More training. Stark can live a few more years. When we are ready, we will"
The wall came in.
Not an explosion, not a blast, just the wall choosing to stop being a wall in a section roughly the size of a doorway, rubble tumbling forward and dust billowing out across the floor, and through the opening came the shape of an Iron Legion suit, not Tony's configuration, one of the others, moving with the careful deliberateness of something that has been instructed to be non-threatening.
The voice that came from it was calm and clearly articulated.
"Please do not be alarmed. I am Jarvis, the artificial intelligence assistant operating within the Iron Man system. I have been directed to locate civilians in this area and escort them to safety. You are not in danger from me. Please trust me enough to come with me and I will ensure you are clear of the battlefield."
Pietro's free hand had already moved behind his back, the fingers flickering through a vibration that was not quite visible, slowing again as Jarvis finished speaking.
He drew a breath. Pulled Wanda a little closer with the arm already around her shoulders.
"Thank God," he said, with exactly the right amount of relief. "We have been trapped in here since the shooting started. Thank you, really, Iron Man, thank you so much."
The drones swept the city streets in coordinated patterns, their anti-gravity engines producing a low collective hum that underscored the sharper sounds of combat below. The lascannon bursts they fired were quick and precise, suppressing the Hydra positions that the ground elements were pressing against. Between the drones and the Scyllax Guardian-automata moving at street level, chainswords running and ceramite shrugging off the fire that came back at them, the Hydra foothold in the city was collapsing inward toward the fortress hill.
Nolan came through a cleared intersection with David alongside him, the power armour's sensors reading the engagement geometry through the smoke and light, and he found Thor's position from the structural damage pattern in the nearest building before he actually saw Thor.
Tony was helping him walk. Thor was walking, which was the important thing, and he was doing so with the expression of a man who has decided that his current situation is embarrassing and is managing that embarrassment through sheer force of dignity.
"Thor." Nolan looked him over through the eyepiece as he got closer. "Your condition."
"Adequate." Thor straightened slightly, which produced a brief expression that was not wincing, strictly speaking, but was in the same neighbourhood. "Asgardian constitution. I was careless. It will not happen again."
He was holding Mjolnir perhaps slightly tighter than the grip required.
David stepped forward with a panacea capsule from its medical kit and offered it without comment. Thor accepted it with the expression of someone accepting help and choosing not to make remarks about it, and within a minute the colour had begun to come back properly into his face.
He dropped a hand onto Tony's armoured shoulder, which produced a sound like someone slapping the hood of a car.
"Thank you. Both of you."
Tony had his faceplate up. The expression underneath it was doing several things at once, most of them related to how close the calculation had apparently been.
"It should be me thanking you. If you hadn't been standing where you were when that shell came through, it would have been my back it hit. And I do not think a panacea capsule would have covered my particular situation." He closed the faceplate again. "So. Yes. Thank you."
David's eyes pulsed once.
"My lord. Chapter Master Tyberos has breached the fortress entrance and is engaged inside. Doom's forces have reached the cliff approach behind the hill and are advancing on the rear fortifications. Hydra's capacity to hold both points simultaneously is unlikely to last long."
Nolan settled the grip on his Warscythe.
"Pull the Intelligent Control Corps from the city streets to the fortress. The city is clear enough. Concentrate everything on the final push."
He turned toward Tony and Thor.
"Second half," he said simply. "Let's finish it."
The lascannon beams from the Intelligent Control robots came down from the hill's approach and went through the secret fortress's outer defensive positions with the particular decisiveness of weapons that had been designed for exactly this kind of work. The metal bunkers that the Hydra elite soldiers had been using as fire positions became, in sequence, very hot, and then were not usable as fire positions anymore. The Defence Force companies came out of their own cover in the wake of the beams, lasguns up, advancing in the disciplined rushes they had been trained to execute, the Intelligent Control Corps units moving with them in the coordinated pattern that David's remote management made possible.
On the far side of the fortress, above the cliff, Doom was working.
He was standing in the air above the rock face, the dark green cape moving in the night wind that came off the hills, and every time his ceramite palm swept outward the hellfire that answered the gesture found another cluster of Hydra soldiers on the fortress's upper levels and removed them from consideration with a thoroughness that fire is particularly suited to. He was not hurrying. He was methodical, which was more efficient than hurrying.
Through his eyepiece, he read the casualty distribution in his Defence Force companies, noted the pressure on the approach route, and opened a channel to the first company captain.
"Demolitionists, forward with one team of Scyllax-class Guardian-automata. Proceed to the base of the fortress wall on the eastern face. You are to place high-explosive charges on the foundation and create an entry breach for the assault element."
The captain's voice came back immediately, clear and without hesitation.
"Understood. Demolitionists, on me, bring your charges."
He looked up toward Doom's position in the air for a fraction of a second, laspistol in his hand, and then he turned back to his soldiers.
"For the glory of the Imperial Aquila!" The words came out of him at full volume, the kind of volume that is meant to be heard, that is meant to carry past the sound of weapons and reach the people who need to hear it. "For Lord Doom! Charge!"
He was out of the bunker before the Scyllax units had fully moved to cover him, the demolitionists behind him with the same momentum, not waiting, not calculating, just going.
Doom saw it. He was already moving his palm before the captain had cleared the bunker's edge, the defensive spells falling across the running figures like a second layer of armour, taking the deflected rounds and the near misses and redirecting them into the ground or the rock or anywhere that was not a person who had chosen to run first.
Three minutes later, the explosion from the eastern wall base lit the surrounding hillside briefly white and threw debris across the approaches in a wide scatter. When the sound finished rolling back off the mountains, the hole in the fortress wall was large enough to drive a vehicle through.
Doom's voice went out across every channel simultaneously.
"All Defence Force elements and Intelligent Control Corps: advance on the breach."
A pause of exactly the weight a pause needs to be before the words that follow it.
"For the glory of the Imperial Aquila. For Primarch."
"All units: attack."