The spatial fluctuations hit before the sound did.
They rolled outward from the Cosmic Cube's housing in visible waves, bending the air the way heat bends it above hot metal, and everything within a dozen meters of the destroyed device simply ceased to exist in any stable configuration. The floor buckled. The mechanical structure, already gutted by Wanda's power, came apart in fragments that the fluctuations took and scattered. The space itself stuttered.
Wanda was thrown backward as if struck by something enormous and invisible. The scarlet energy she had been pouring into the suppression effort snapped back into her, and she went with it, hitting the wall and sliding down it. The red ceramite plate that covered her from throat to boots was scored across every surface, deep lines cut through the paint and into the material beneath, spreading like ice fractures across a frozen lake.
She did not get up.
The air at the center of the room folded.
The portal that opened was several meters across, its edges turning slowly inward, framing a cold light that had no source visible through it. The fluctuations continued to pulse outward from it in rings.
Two figures stepped through.
They stood at least three meters tall. The exposed skin of their bodies was blood-red, rough, covered in fine cracked lines that ran through it like veins of ice. Their armor carried a dark metallic luster and fit their bodies the way armor fit something that had been built to wear it from birth. They moved into the space and stopped, and the room seemed smaller for having them in it.
Doom and Jessica reacted simultaneously.
They had closed less than a third of the distance when the third figure appeared.
Shorter, hunched, wrapped entirely in black robes. A silver mask covered the face completely, smooth and expressionless, catching the blue light of the portal's edge. One pale hand emerged from the robes, holding a scepter topped with a gemstone that caught and scattered the ambient light in colors that did not quite belong to any normal spectrum. The figure walked unhurriedly out from behind the two larger bodies, reached into the air where the Cosmic Cube had been drifting loose, and closed the pale hand around it.
"Little insects." The voice that came from behind the silver mask was hoarse, almost amused. "Blood Brothers. Finish them and let us be on our way."
The two blood-red giants turned their heads toward Doom and Jessica. The cracked mouths split into smiles that contained no warmth whatsoever.
"Gh'Ree."
"R'Hos."
They said it together, in the same register, and then they moved.
Both sets of feet hit the floor simultaneously, the impact producing a brief shockwave that sent debris skittering outward in a ring. They crossed the space between themselves and their targets at a speed that made the eye work to keep up with it, and the impacts, when they landed, were not combat blows in any technical sense. They were statements about the difference in mass and strength between what they were and what Doom and Jessica were.
The sound of it echoed down every passage in the underground complex.
Doom and Jessica went backward. Both of them. Separately, rolling, the ceramite breastplates of their power armor deforming inward under the fist marks left in them, cracks spreading outward from each point of impact in jagged lines across the chest and abdominal plates.
Doom got to one knee first. His ceramite palm came forward and the hellfire poured out of it immediately, a wall of it, deep and sourceless, filling the passage between himself and the two giants, obscuring their line of sight and route of advance.
"Jessica." He did not look back. "Take Wanda. Retreat now. Call the base for reinforcements the moment you have a signal."
Jessica had already rolled upright. She crossed the space to Wanda in a few strides, reached down with one hand, and lifted the unconscious nun armor from the floor as if it weighed nothing. She turned her helmet toward Doom.
"Doom, retreat with us. The Lamenters are on their way back. We regroup and engage together."
The hellfire was burning. On the other side of it, footsteps.
"Jessica." Doom rose from his knee and lifted off the floor, his cloak spreading as the power armor's systems carried him upward into the passage airspace. Both hands were moving through witchcraft gestures, building something complex and layered over the top of the hellfire. "You cannot handle what is walking through that fire, and neither can the Lamenters. Someone has to hold this position. The Cube cannot leave this underground in that man's hands."
A pause, just long enough to be heard as deliberate.
"Stop talking and go."
Jessica looked at him for one second. Then she turned away without another word, Wanda held against her chest in one arm and the power scythe in the other hand, and ran.
Her magnetic boots hammered the passage floor in a receding rhythm, carrying both of them deeper into the darkness of the base.
Behind her, Doom's hellfire and witchcraft fire opened across the passage together, layer on layer, driving against two figures who walked through the flames the way weather walks through open country.
The Thunderhawk was running at full engine power, ten kilometers out from Manhattan, the city lights visible through the cockpit glass in a wide bright band below the cloud base.
Nolan was sitting with his eyes closed when David spoke.
"My Lord. Communication contact with Doom and the others was lost approximately ten minutes ago. The signal is being blocked or interfered with at the source. I have attempted reconnection repeatedly without success."
Nolan's eyes stayed closed for a moment. He processed it.
"A small group of alien infiltrators and a mortal fugitive. Jessica and the Lamenters have both handled worse without difficulty." He opened his eyes and exhaled slowly. "Is anything unusual showing in New York right now?"
"Conventional incidents only, no..." David paused. The pause was not a processing delay. "Wait."
Nolan was already moving.
He crossed into the cockpit in three strides and looked through the forward glass, and what he saw stopped him where he stood.
Rising from the center of Manhattan Island, a blue energy beam, the width of a city block, climbing vertically into the cloud base and beyond it. And above the clouds, lit by what was rising through them, the slow, vast shape of a space portal condensing, its diameter already larger than any structure in the city below. Ten kilometers across, still growing.
Nolan stared at it.
"The Cosmic Cube." He said it quietly, as if he were confirming something to himself rather than speaking to David. "It's been activated. Doom must have encountered something he wasn't prepared for."
He looked at the portal and recognized what was coming through it.
"David." His voice did not change register. "This is the alien invasion I briefed you on. It is beginning now."
He turned toward the cockpit controls.
"Contact Twin Islands and Latveria. The Lamenters company, the Stormtrooper company, and the Thunderhawk formation, full mobilization, converge on New York. Immediately."
"Contact the master of New York's Sanctum. We need their portal network to move large numbers of troops to the battlefield without delay."
"Contact Tony and Thor from the Inquisition. Contact Rogers at S.H.I.E.L.D. Every superhuman asset within range of Manhattan needs to be moving now."
David's eyes lit blue. The orders went out, one after another, in the same second. The Thunderhawk's engines pushed harder, the airframe shuddering slightly as the speed climbed, and the city rushed toward them through the glass.
Nolan turned back toward the cabin. He had made preparations for this. He had known the Chitauri would come, or something like them, because the conditions that attracted them had not changed simply because the original architect of the New York invasion had died years before his planned moment. Someone else had filled that role. Someone behind the man in the silver mask, or the man himself.
He stood in front of the cabin door as it began to open, the wind from outside cutting through the gap and moving across his vibranium plate. His hand came out, palm open, and from the simulator's storage interface, the Warscythe materialized in his grip: the Blood Scythe, long and dark, its edge holding a faint inner light.
He looked at the portal above Manhattan.
"Whoever arranged this," he said, to no one in particular and to whoever was responsible equally, "you had better hope that my students and my marshals are alive when I reach the ground. You had better hope the casualty count does not exceed what I can accept."
The cabin door finished opening and the wind came fully in.
"Otherwise, I will spare a lot of time to personally lead countless Astartes regiments and void fleets to visit your secret nest! Carry out hundreds and thousands of times of revenge massacres for the human victims in this invasion war!"
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