Nolan's boots hit the cracked street in a steady rhythm, the vibranium plate carrying him forward at a pace that ate up the blocks between him and the energy beam rising to feed the portal above the city.
He did not look up. He knew where it was.
The sound of engines reached him from above before the hover vehicles were visible. He raised both arms without breaking stride, and the Ten Rings spread from his forearms and went out in a flat pattern across the airspace overhead. The Chitauri formation that had identified a single figure on the street below and adjusted course accordingly ceased to exist as a formation in the following second, the vehicles coming apart in sequential detonations that rained metal and fire across three blocks.
Nolan kept moving.
He could see the beam now with the naked eye, a pillar of blue energy that held itself perfectly vertical from the ground to the portal's base, thick enough to cast its own shadow. Leviathans circled it in slow overlapping orbits, functioning as a defensive perimeter against the Thunderhawk formation working the area below. It was an effective arrangement. Against what David was coordinating, it was ultimately insufficient, but it cost time, and the portal was still open.
Without that portal, the math changed entirely. The Defense Force columns were compressing the Chitauri's operational space by increments. The Lamenters in Terminator plate were clearing their sectors completely, nothing getting back up behind them. The trajectory of the battle was not in doubt. What remained in doubt was how long the portal stayed open and how much it put through before it closed.
Nolan slowed.
Something had changed in the immediate environment around him. Not a sound, not a visible movement: a quality in the air, a pressure that his instincts identified before his conscious mind had finished registering it. He had learned not to ignore that.
He brought the Warscythe around in a wide arc without stopping to confirm a target.
The blade found something.
Three meters away, at street level, a shimmer in the air resolved under the Warscythe's passage into something solid and real: a Chitauri giant ape, massive, built for close assault, caught in the process of emerging from an invisibility field that the green light along the blade's edge had disrupted. The creature was halfway out of its concealment when the blade completed its arc and finished the question.
Illusion-based concealment. He looked at the surrounding street with new attention.
The faint sound of displaced air reached his left side.
He brought the vibranium fist across in a short horizontal strike without turning fully, and it connected with something that was still invisible, the impact driving the second giant ape out of its concealment field and across the street surface, where it stopped against a building foundation and did not get up cleanly.
Nolan crossed to it in three strides and the Shadow Step took him the rest of the way, the dimensional shortcut depositing him directly above the creature's position. He came down on its chest with both boots and drove the skull into the road surface on the way back up.
He straightened and looked at the street.
He drew the Heart of the Furnace from its holster at his waist. Closed his eyes. The instinct that had been developed across years of simulator combat and real engagements took the environmental information his other senses were providing and gave him angles.
He pulled the trigger.
The plasma spheres expanded from the muzzle in overlapping trajectories, each one blooming into a spreading tide of superheated matter that rolled outward through the ruins. Within a hundred meters, the temperature sufficient to strip an invisibility field from anything biological swept through every gap and alley and broken interior. The giant apes that had been waiting their turn came out of their concealment in the only way available to them, converted to ash before they fully emerged.
Nolan opened his eyes, holstered the Heart of the Furnace, and looked at the empty, ash-covered street.
"Stop wasting soldiers on tests." His voice carried clearly in the sudden quiet. "I know you are here. Come out, Loki."
The silence held for several seconds.
Then the voice came: cold, controlled, but underneath the control something that had been burning for a long time.
"I finally found you. Do you know how much I missed you, during all those years of suffering?"
A pause. The words that followed were quieter, and that made them worse.
"I want to eat your flesh and blood. Pull every bone from your body."
The illusion field across the street receded like a tide going out, the green light folding back from the edges inward until the street appeared as it was. Standing at its center was a figure in black robes, a silver mask pushed up above his face now, a gemstone scepter in one hand. Short, slightly stooped, the posture of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time. And above the pale thin face, set into the forehead, a plate of Uru metal that had not been there the last time they had met.
Behind him, Chitauri infantry moved in ranks. Their weapons were up and indexed. Their minds were not their own.
Nolan looked at the Uru metal. Looked at the pale face beneath it. His expression did not change.
"This is your chosen approach." He kept his voice level. "Disappointing."
He closed his hand around the Warscythe's grip.
"I crush your skull but it looks you still manage to stay alive, you like a cockroach, Loki. That was an error of generosity I won't repeat. I will grind you to ash this time. That is not a threat. It is a schedule."
Loki's thin face moved into something that was not quite a smile.
"A bug." He said it conversationally, tilting his head slightly. "Hiding in a corner, sheltered by greater powers, with decent individual strength and absolutely no grasp of anything beyond the wall of your own small world." He began to pace, slowly, with the deliberate ease of someone who believed the outcome was already settled. "I should thank you, actually. Without your interference, I would never have been pushed far enough to survive the depths of the universe. And what I found there, those ancient beings, what they showed me, you cannot imagine it."
He stopped pacing.
"The Earth is already mine. Your mortal soldiers and your alien-trained warriors cannot hold a Chitauri fleet. Mankind's defeat is a matter of timing, nothing more."
Nolan looked at him. Then he looked at the Uru metal again, and at the scepter, and at the diminished, twisted figure holding it.
"Loki." He said it with something close to genuine pity, which was the most cutting thing available. "Thanos sent you here as a forward agent. A scout. An expendable tool to open a door for forces he controls. You know this. You accepted it." He held the Warscythe loosely at his side. "You had pride once. You had a certain quality of stubbornness that was almost admirable. Now you have a metal plate in your skull and you are running errands for the Mad Titan. Thor should not have to see what you have become."
The pale face went from white to red in a single moment.
The scepter came up.
The Chitauri ranks behind Loki shifted, weapons adjusting, fingers finding triggers, the controlled bodies moving in the perfect unison of things that had no hesitation left in them.
And then the thunder arrived.
Not as sound first, as pressure: the shockwave of a landing that carried the weight of someone who had been falling from a considerable height and had not slowed down before impact. Lightning scattered across the ground in a ring from the point of impact, and a tall figure straightened from the crouch the landing had put him in, hammer in hand, electricity still moving across the surface of his armor.
Thor looked across the street. His expression went through several things rapidly and settled on something that was neither relief nor grief but contained elements of both.
"Loki."
A breath.
"You're still alive?!"