CLINTON FRANCIS BARTON
CODENAME: HAWKEYE
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
ROOFTOP, EAST 44TH STREET
The last arrow went through a Chitauri soldier’s neck at two hundred and twelve yards.
Clint knew the distance because he’d ranged the shot forty seconds before he took it, the way he ranged everything, the way his brain had been doing the math on distances and trajectories and wind variables since he was eleven years old and his friend dared him to hit a tin can at the other end of a field and he’d done it first try and understood immediately that this was the thing he was going to be for the rest of his life.
He reached back into the quiver.
Empty.
He’d known it was coming.
He’d been rationing for the last six minutes, picking targets that would take down more than one.
Two shafts saved for the pair of skiffs that had been running the same pattern on 46th.
One for a weight bearing scaffold to rain it down on the ground troops that had been moving civilians toward a dead end on 43rd.
The rest had gone to keeping the avenue below him clear enough that the people still running had somewhere to run to.
Now the quiver was almost empty and when it ran out all he would have would be the bow in his hand that was, functionally, a stick.
He crouched behind the rooftop parapet and took stock.
Below him the avenue had changed.
He’d noticed it about four minutes ago, the wave pattern shifting, the reinforcements from the portal thinning out and then stopping entirely, the Chitauri already on the ground continuing to push but without the constant replenishment that had been making the fight impossible all morning.
He’d looked up and seen the green wall above Stark Tower and understood immediately.
The kid had actually done it.
He pulled his earpiece.
“Barton to anyone on comms. I’m almost dry. Repeat, I am almost out of arrows, I’d ask for a resupply but… they were on the quinjet.”
Static.
Then Rogers’ voice, slightly breathless but steady.
“Copy that Barton, hold your position, protect any civilians you can, but we need eyes on Loki that’s your priority.”
“Holding,” Clint said, and settled in behind the parapet with his empty quiver and his bow, watching the avenue sky above with a scanning eye, patient and unhurried.
His eyes moved to the green wall holding the sky closed above the tower.
ANGELICA JONES
CODENAME: FIRESTAR
HELL’S KITCHEN, NEW YORK
WEST 45TH STREET
The group had grown.
That was the thing nobody had planned for, the thing that had turned a quiet street in Hell’s Kitchen into something else entirely over the past 30 minutes.
The nineteen had become thirty, then forty, then something closer to eighty as word spread the way word spread in a city under attack.
Angelica hovered twelve feet off the ground above the intersection and tried to keep track of all of it simultaneously.
Rosario had turned the ground floor of the building they were holing up in into a triage station, the owner having unlocked it without being asked and then immediately started helping, the two of them moving through the wounded.
Paulie stood at the south end of the block like a very large piece of architecture, his arms crossed, watching the streets with a cold look in his eyes.
Then the small alien flyer appeared at the north end.
It came in low, slower than the ones she’d been watching run attack patterns over Midtown, hunting rather than attacking, six aliens rode it, weapons up, scanning the street, their flight speeding up as they saw her floating in the air, fire at her fists. New chapters come out on novelping dot com first.
Angelica didn’t hesitate, the stakes were too high for her to let her fear get the best of her, she was already moving a blazing comet of fire cutting across the intersection at a speed that put her between the skiff and the building before the lead soldier finished raising its weapon, and the bolt of superheated air she put into the skiff was not a precision shot, it was everything she had compressed into a single point, white hot and it’s impact the carriage came apart from the inside out.
The ground troops went in every direction.
Paulie was already moving toward the ones that landed, which she appreciated, because her hands were shaking.
She was exhausted, the sustained burn of hours of fighting with a mutation she had avoided using ever since she melted all those ice sculptures, she could feel the edges of her control starting to fray without rest, the radiation bleeding slightly beyond where she was directing it, the precision that usually came naturally becoming harder to keep.
She landed on the roof of the building and breathed for a moment.
Below her Paulie was busy pummeling the aliens.
Rosario appeared in the doorway, looked at Paulie using one alien to pummel the other, said something in Spanish that Angelica didn’t catch, and went back inside.
She looked up at the sky above Midtown, at the giant green wall keeping the portal closed.
Zeke…
She thought about the man who had told her she was the most important person on the street, who had looked at her like the answer to a problem rather than a problem to be managed.
She hoped he was okay.
Another group of Reptiles turned a corner appearing at the south end of the block, judging from the roars and screams, they were chasing someone down.
Her hair flared up into flame as she manipulated the radiation around her and took flight.
NATASHA ROMANOFF
CODENAME: BLACK WIDOW
PARK AVENUE, MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
The Chitauri on her end of the avenue had stopped acting as cohesively as they been five minutes ago, they’re attention split.
She knew this not because anyone had told her but because she had been watching them and she knew what a networked combatant looked like when its network was distracted.
The half-second hesitation before movement, the loss of formation coherence.
The way coordinated aggression became individual aggression, which was a different and considerably more manageable thing.
She put her elbow into the jaw of the nearest one, took its weapon as it fell, and used it to clear the three behind it in a single sweep.
“They’re distracted,” Rogers said from somewhere to her left, his shield taking a blast that would have taken her head off.
“The pattern’s breaking down.”
“He did it,” she said.
A pause.
Short, the way Rogers’ pauses were short, because he didn’t waste time on anything including surprise.
“Yeah,” he said.
“He did, he didn’t seem the type to make empty promises.”
She vaulted over a wrecked taxi and landed in a low run that covered the distance to the next cluster before they’d finished their half-second hesitation.
The disorganization made them predictable in a way they hadn’t been all morning and she used it, moving through them with as little energy as possible on each engagement.
She thought about the green wall above the tower, and the man responsible for it, she had spent her entire career developing an instinct for people who were what they said they were versus people who were something else wearing the right face.
It was the skill she trusted more than any other and it had been wrong exactly once in her life, in a safehouse in Budapest, with a man she had since decided was the exception that proved the rule rather than evidence against the rule itself.
She had watched Green Lantern for less than five minutes today.
It was enough.
He was earnest, that was the first thing, the most immediate thing, the thing that stood out before anything else did.
It wasn’t performed earnestness, not the careful construction of someone who had learned that sincerity was disarming and was using it deliberately, but the real thing, the kind that came from someone who had not yet learned to be embarrassed by caring. Get faster updates on NovelPing.
It showed in the way he’d spoken to Rogers, the slight forward lean, the attention that was slightly too complete, the way he’d visibly recalibrated when Rogers treated him as an equal rather than a civilian.
He wanted to be taken seriously by people he took seriously.
That kind of earnestness implied a history of not being taken seriously, which implied either a background that had consistently underestimated him or a power set that was new enough that he hadn’t built confidence in it yet.
Probably both.
The dependence on external validation was minor and likely unconscious.
He would not respond well to being managed but would respond well to being trusted, which was useful information.
The vagueness about his powers was more interesting.
He had described them in broad strokes, anything he could clearly imagine, charge, limits he didn’t specify.
The vagueness itself had two possible explanations, either he genuinely didn’t know the full parameters yet, which was consistent with the new power set reading, or he knew something specific about a vulnerability and had made a deliberate decision not to share it to a group of people he had met a couple of minutes ago.
Again she thought it was probably both of those things simultaneously.
The ring was the power source, that much was obvious.
The way his eyes dropped to it when he was explaining himself, the way the light from it responded to his emotional state, the way he’d touched it unconsciously when Rogers asked what happened if the barrier broke.
He was aware of it in the way people were aware of something they were protecting, or relying on.
Which meant the ring was also the vulnerability.
“Rogers,” she said, taking down the last of the cluster with a heel to the back of a knee and a electricity covered forearm across the throat.
“We need to talk about the kid.”
“After,” Rogers said, his shield coming back to his hand in a flat arc that she ducked under on instinct.
“After,” she agreed.
She looked up at the green wall above the tower, it had been holding for six minutes now.
She picked up her pace.
THOR ODINSON
SON OF ODIN
AIRSPACE ABOVE STARK TOWER
He saw them before they had fully committed to the approach.
Twelve skiffs, breaking from the main formation above the avenue and banking west in a wide arc that was not a patrol pattern and was not a retreat.
Thor tracked their trajectory, followed it to its conclusion, and understood immediately.
They were going for the barrier.
Not from the other side, where the Green Lantern was holding the wall closed against an army, but from this side, the unprotected side, the side where a man was pouring everything he had into a wall with his back exposed to the sky.
Thor had given his word.
He swung the hammer once, feeling the lightning respond the way it always responded, immediate and total, the charge building across the hammer’s face, up his arm and across his armor and then he flew directly into the formation’s path.
The first skiff saw him coming and tried to bank away, he hit it with the hammer and it stopped being a solid object.
The second and third came in from opposite sides, the coordination of a networked unit, and he let them come, taking the energy blasts across his chest because he could and answered with a lightning discharge that jumped between both skiffs simultaneously and left them both falling.
The remaining nine pulled up and reformed.
Thor rose above them, the hammer spinning in a wide arc, the lightning trailing it in a helix that illuminated the smoke above the avenue in a strobing blue-white.
“You will not,” he said, to the nine skiffs and whatever controlled them and the mothership behind the wall that had sent them, “reach him.”
He called down lighting on all of them.