New York City. The streets.
The noise of it was total. Screaming, running feet, the percussion of energy weapon impacts against concrete and glass and vehicle bodywork, the secondary explosions when fuel tanks went. Chitauri infantry dropped from the sky on their hovercrafts in clusters, and the people in the streets below had nowhere that qualified as safe, only directions that had not yet been reached.
Most of them did not make it far.
The energy fire came from above and from the sides, and it did not discriminate. What it touched either burned or ceased to exist as a coherent structure. The cars jammed in the center of every road became obstacles, then became secondary hazards as trailing collisions and incoming fire turned them into expanding fireballs and fragmentation sources. The people who had been running between them stopped running.
On one of the side streets, away from the densest concentrations of Chitauri fire, a figure in a dark green cloak was still moving.
The cloak was in pieces. More than half of it was gone, and what remained was scorched at the edges and stained with something dark. The power armor beneath it had taken damage that the frame was working to compensate for, servos straining where the housing had been compromised, the left arm assembly absent entirely, the stump sealed off by emergency systems to prevent further power loss. Doom ran, and the run was not the run of someone at full capacity.
The medical life support had activated long before this. The panacea injections had gone in at intervals, each one repairing what the last fight had broken: ruptured organs, compound fractures, internal hemorrhaging. It had kept him functional. It had also extracted a cost that the panacea had not been designed to waive. Healing was not recovery from nothing. It drew on the body's own cellular reserves, accelerated what should have taken weeks into minutes, and a mortal body had a finite amount of that to give before it began to disagree with the process.
Doom's thoughts were moving slower than he wanted them to. He was aware of this, which was worse than not being aware of it. He found himself thinking, briefly and with uncharacteristic bitterness, that Reditus had offered to arrange a super soldier serum enhancement months ago, and he had declined on the grounds that he had not needed it at the time.
Above him, a Chitauri hovercraft banked across the gap between buildings.
He raised his remaining ceramite hand without stopping and called the hellfire up. It came, deep and sourceless, the kind of fire that did not require oxygen, and it went up into the hovercraft and through the Chitauri on it. They came off the craft burning, and the craft itself, no longer guided, completed a long uncontrolled arc and came down two blocks away with enough force to close the street entirely.
Doom exhaled the blood from his mouth and kept moving.
His helmet's scanning function activated, and the eyepiece swept the street behind him.
The Blood Brothers were there.
They walked with their steps exactly synchronized, shoulders moving in the same rhythm, taking up the center of the road. Their blood-red faces, crossed with lines like cracked ice, wore expressions of sustained amusement. From the heavy armor at their waists, suspended by makeshift hooks, hung the severed heads of Stormtroopers and Lamenters, still dripping.
"R'Hos thinks you have done well," the left one said.
"Gh'Ree wants you to surrender," the right one said.
They said the next part together, the overlapping voices producing a sound that did not quite belong to a single throat: "Blood Brothers does not have a human slave yet."
Doom stopped.
He turned, raised his hand, and sent the hellfire forward in concentrated bursts, one after another, aiming at center mass on both of them. The flames hit. The flames that could melt ceramite plate struck blood-red skin and dark armor and did not stop them. The Blood Brothers walked through it the way something walks through weather it has simply decided to ignore, and the grins on their cracked faces got wider.
Doom calculated the gap between himself and the nearest cross-street and began backing toward it.
A sound. Small, out of place.
In an abandoned car to his left, a child was sitting in the back seat. Young, wrapped in what looked like sleeping clothes, holding a stuffed rabbit. Crying quietly, the kind of crying that comes after the louder kind has been going for too long.
Doom saw it.
The Blood Brothers saw it too.
Their expressions changed in a specific way. Not more violent. More interested.
They turned from Doom and launched their charge toward the car.
The ground cracked under the impact of their first steps.
Doom did not deliberate. His telekinesis reached the car door before his mind had finished forming the order, tore it open, found the child, and pulled. The child came out of the car in a controlled arc, trailing the rabbit doll, eyes going wide, and Doom's remaining arm closed around the small body before the child had time to understand what was happening.
He had the child against the broken breastplate, sheltered there, when the Blood Brothers adjusted course and hit him instead.
Four fists, two from each, in rapid sequence. Doom twisted on his magnetic boots, rotating hard, putting his back to the impact rather than the child. The power backpack took the hits instead of the child. The force of it drove him forward, and he kept the child tight against the broken ceramite and did not let go.
The street shook.
Then something crossed the sky above the intersection at a speed that produced a sound, a displacement of air that arrived before the objects themselves were visible, and ten metal rings trailing purple energy came down in sequence on the Blood Brothers like a barrage of aimed artillery.
Each one struck and the brothers went with it, rolling, driven back, their armored bodies crashing through the surface of the road and leaving gouges in the asphalt.
Nolan came down between them and the ground.
He landed in the street with his full weight and all the force of his descent behind him, and the impact sent a ring of debris outward across the road surface and left a visible depression in the asphalt where his boots struck. He was upright before the dust had settled, the Warscythe in his right hand, the faint green light along its edge moving slowly in the air.
He turned and looked at Doom over his shoulder.
One look. Enough to read the damage.
He turned back toward the street.
"Damn xenos." His voice was level, carrying no heat, which was more dangerous than if it had. "Your opponent is me."
The Blood Brothers came out of the craters in the road.
Nolan went toward them.
The ten rings spread around him as he ran, orbiting, accelerating, and when the distance closed and the collision came, the shock wave produced by the impact spread visibly through the surrounding air in a ring, pressing the smoke and debris flat for an instant before the chaos returned.
One Iron-Blooded Brother took the vibranium fist across the jaw and left the ground entirely, traveling backward through the air until a building wall stopped him.
The other one's feet slipped on the torn asphalt in the same moment, and the Warscythe found the gap.
The body came apart at the torso, the thick dark armor and the blood-red body within it, cleaved in a single stroke. The upper half dropped. The lower half dropped separately.
The surviving brother surfaced from the building wall. What came out of it was not a roar exactly; it was larger than that, filling the intersection, pressing against the storefronts on all four sides.
"Gh'Ree is dead! R'Hos will tear you alive!"
Nolan looked at him. His expression did not change.
He raised one hand, and the ten metal rings responded, gathering, accelerating, and then releasing outward in a tightening spiral pattern that screamed as it moved through the air, each ring following the one ahead of it in a configuration that turned the space between them and the target into something that had no place to be except destroyed.
Ten metal rings that emitted terrifying screams violently launched an almost lingchi-like metal spiral storm towards the tall alien not far away.
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