Nolan knelt on one knee and picked up the broken half of the Mind Scepter from the rubble.
The top of the curved shaft held a gemstone the size of an egg, blue light moving inside it in slow, continuous pulses, energy that did not diminish even with the scepter destroyed around it. It radiated something that was not heat and not light but was perceptible to anyone who had spent time around objects that operated at a level beyond normal matter.
The Mind Stone. One of the six Infinity Stones.
Nolan looked at it for a moment, turning it slightly in his gauntlet.
"The Space Stone was already close. Now this." He was talking to no one in particular, or perhaps to whatever accounting system he kept internally. "The Mad Titan provided an unexpected gift without intending to. I should probably thank him."
He stood, slid the broken scepter and its gem into the storage compartment beneath the power backpack, and turned toward Thor.
"Come on. Let's end this."
Thor, who had not spoken since Loki's death, did not speak now. He raised Mjolnir once and was already moving, the lightning that followed him spreading across the sky as he climbed toward the energy beam, fast enough that the air closed behind him with a sound.
Nolan ran after him.
The encirclement had been tightening for the better part of an hour.
The Land Raiders worked the perimeter, their heavy tracks processing the battlefield floor without ceremony, lascannons on their rooflines cycling through targets as fast as the targeting systems could acquire them. The twin heavy bolters at the sponsons suppressed anything that tried to break from the Chitauri mass toward the civilian evacuation corridors. Between the vehicles, moving in the gaps with the steady patience of warriors who were not in any hurry because the outcome was not in question, the Lamenters in Terminator plate applied their storm bolters with the methodical thoroughness of people completing a task rather than fighting a battle.
Above all of it, Tony led the Iron Legion in a coordinated pattern with the Thunderhawk formation, working the airspace in overlapping sectors, the Leviathans falling one by one as the combined firepower found each in turn. The biology of a Leviathan was considerable and it did not stop being considerable under fire, but it stopped being alive eventually, and the wreckage that came down was enormous.
Then Nolan arrived in the encirclement's center.
The effect of it was not something anyone ordered or coordinated. The Wehrmacht soldiers at the outer perimeter saw him, and the Lamenters inside it saw him, and all of them felt something change in the quality of the moment. The Inquisition members who were nearby, still working to understand what exactly they had partnered with, watched the Lamenters drop their storm bolters to their slings and reach over their shoulders for their chainswords, and then watched every armored giant follow Nolan's charging line into the compressed Chitauri mass without requiring any instruction to do so.
What followed was not a battle in any technical sense. It was a conclusion.
Thirty minutes later, the area directly below the portal was empty of living Chitauri. Sky and ground alike. The fires burning in the buildings around the perimeter were the loudest things remaining.
Nolan walked out from the inner circle of the Terminator teams, his vibranium plate stained in the colors of the engagement. A few meters ahead of him, suspended above a pattern of Asgardian runes carved into the broken street surface, the Cosmic Cube drifted, the last of its energy cycling upward through the beam to feed the portal still open above the city.
He stopped.
"David." The comm channel opened. "Any indication that the local official forces or S.H.I.E.L.D. are preparing to launch a nuclear strike?"
David's voice returned without delay.
"No, my Lord. Rogers is on the battlefield and has not authorized any such option. The air force bases surrounding New York were brought to readiness, but the action plan was canceled at White House level before any deployment occurred. Presently, Congress is holding emergency sessions, and based on the communications passing through those channels, the Guardians of Terra should expect sustained international attention in the aftermath of this engagement. Extended political wrangling is likely."
Nolan's mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile.
"The situation forces their hand. The noble gentlemen rarely control how things develop when it reaches this point." He kept his voice level. "David, continue infiltration operations. I want full visibility on their decision-making at every level. Deploy the trained agents and maintain the coverage."
"As you command, my Lord."
Nolan raised the Warscythe and brought it down through the rune array.
The carvings broke and dimmed sequentially as the blade passed through them. The energy beam above the array lost coherence, narrowing and flickering, and then the light that had been climbing from the street to the portal's base simply stopped. The portal above New York contracted, the edges folding inward, the vast circular shape that had dominated the city's skyline for hours shrinking to a point and then to nothing.
On the far side of it, somewhere in the cold between star systems, the Chitauri fleet completed its transit and found no destination waiting.
The Cosmic Cube fell.
It hit the street surface with a sound that was surprisingly ordinary for an object containing a fundamental stone of the universe, a sharp, clean impact like a stone on tile. Nolan stepped forward and closed his hand around it.
He looked at it. Then at the Mind Stone stored below his backpack. Then, despite himself, at the Lamenters around him and at Thor and Tony descending from the sky above.
"Two down," he said quietly. "Four remaining."
He paused.
"Why do I feel like I am becoming the villain who collects these things?"
The Lamenters continued cleaning their chainswords. They did not answer.
Nolan looked at the city around him: the fires, the cleared streets, the beginning of something that would need to be rebuilt, and the people who were already starting to emerge from cover.
He took a breath.
"Perhaps for the alien lives affected by what I do, I am not far removed from a villain." A pause. "But for humanity, I have a clear conscience."
The portal's disappearance ended the first phase of the invasion without ceremony.
For the mortals who came back out into the streets in its aftermath, the change in the atmosphere was immediate. The Chitauri were gone or being cleared. The Defense Force soldiers and the armored figures in Terminator plate were still there, moving through the wreckage with organized purpose, and the people who had sheltered through the worst of it found themselves orienting toward them as toward something stable.
The mortal agents working alongside the Lamenters proved more useful in this moment than anyone who had not seen it before would have predicted. The Lamenters cared about the civilians they had protected and it showed in practical ways: in how they positioned themselves at the evacuation points, in how they handled the wounded, in the patience with which they waited while people who had just survived something terrible tried to process it. Rogers making his identity known as Captain America, which happened in the course of the aftermath, moved people less than the consistent presence of the soldiers who had stayed on the line.
David dispatched Imperial Heavy Industries logistics units into the city as soon as the perimeter stabilized, not waiting for official invitation. The collection of Chitauri technology and the sorting of wreckage began efficiently. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents appeared at the city's edge and were noted and worked around.
After a brief discussion among the principals, Tony accepted a title: First Grand Master of the Inquisition. In that capacity, he announced the Inquisition's existence to the world through a broadcast that reached every connected device on the planet within minutes. The announcement was framed as a disclosure rather than a revelation, as if the Inquisition had simply chosen this moment to be visible. It gave the world governments something to address other than the Guardians of Terra directly, a layer between the political machinery and the full reality of what had been operating behind it.
Nolan did not object to the framing. He wanted David to complete the unification of Earth through accumulated leverage rather than open war. It was not a realistic hope at every stage, and he knew it. The middle and late phases of any serious unification effort would produce populations that refused incorporation regardless of the terms offered, and at that point, the Astartes would be the only available instrument.
He was not ready to think about that yet.
For now, the city was quieter than it had been for hours, and the Cosmic Cube was in his hand, and somewhere in the cold between stars, a fleet that no longer had orders was drifting.