And I was all alone again, the sky above Stark Tower was just me, the barrier and the army on the other side.
It was quiet or rather it was as quiet as it could be with a Chitauri armada on the other side of a cracking wall, the barrier groaned again.
[Power reserve: 18%.]
I closed my eyes.
And the words were already there.
I didn’t remember learning them, I remembered always knowing them, the same way I’d always known the sky was blue.
I drew one long breath.
Then I spoke, the words rolled out of me without hesitation, without doubt, without thought.
They echoed across the city.
“In Brightest Day—”
Clint Barton had just put his last looted arrow through a Chitauri soldier’s neck at a hundred and sixty yards, he reached back for the next one before his brain caught up with the fact that there wasn’t one.
His fingers found an empty quiver.
He crouched behind the parapet and looked at the wave of skiffs coming up the avenue below him and then back at his empty quiver.
“Great,” he said.
Then he heard the words echo through the city, followed by a wave of green light pulsing from where the kid was blocking the Chitauri, the green light washed over him like a wave, and when it passed the quiver it wasn’t empty anymore, one green arrow became five, five became twenty, every shaft humming with hard light energy.
He reached in slowly.
Pulled one free.
It was the same dimensions as his standard shaft, the same weight distribution, the same fletching geometry, but it hummed faintly against his fingers with the energy he’d been watching pour off that suit all morning, and when he nocked it, drew and released it, the arrow climbed its arc and then split apart at the apex, each copy finding a separate angle before detonating in overlapping nets of hard green light that dragged countless skiffs together in a midair collision that lit up the avenue below like a second sunrise.
Clint stared at the end of the avenue, then he reached into the quiver and pulled another one.
A slow grin spread across his face, the particular grin of a craftsman who had just been handed a better version of the tool he’d been working with his whole life.
“Oh,” he said quietly, already drawing.
“I can work with this.”
“—In Blackest Night—”
The Hulk disappeared in a shower of laser fire.
Dozens of weapons discharging at once, hundreds of bolts of blue-white plasma bolts overlapping into an unbroken curtain of fire that covered the rooftop he was being ambushed on and swallowed the green figure at its center completely.
Blue-white bolts hammered into him until he vanished behind an unbroken curtain of explosions.
Then the Hulk roared.
The sound of it came up through the plasma curtain before anything else did, deep and enormous, and the green light that followed was not the blue-white of alien weapons but something warmer and more deliberate, spreading outward from the center of the curtain in a pulse that pushed the smoke back from the intersection in a perfect circle.
The construct armor locked into place around him, massive plates, reinforced at every edge, built for impact in both directions and behind him, condensing from the green light, a massive warhammer took shape.
The Hulk looked at it.
The warhammer was roughly the length of a small car standing up.
The Hulk stared at it for a moment, then he smiled, as he closed both hands around the hammer’s handle jumped into the air with a roar and swung.
“—No Evil Shall Escape My Sight—”
Steve Rogers drove his shield through the a Chitauri between him and the bank lobby’s east wall, as its upper body fell to the floor, he retrieved his shield and turned toward the twelve more coming through the doors, trying to take shots at the civilians he was protecting, he didn’t have a good angle on all of them.
He threw the shield anyway.
The shield bounced off the far wall and came back to his hand and he was already moving to use the return momentum when he heard the words, and saw the pulse of green light that followed.
The green light hit the vibranium, it spread from the rim inward, a thin emerald corona that moved with the shield when he moved it and settled into the metal. Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
He felt it through his grip, not heavier, not lighter, just more, the way a good tool felt when it was exactly right for what you were doing.
He threw it again.
The shield crossed the lobby and ricocheted and at the apex of the second bounce something happened that the shield had never done before, construct copies burst from the original in every direction, each one following a different angle, each one finding a different target before collapsing back into the vibranium as it completed its arc and returned to his hand.
The lobby went quiet.
Steve looked down at the shield, at the faint emerald rim still glowing around its edge.
“—Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might—”
Jefferson Davis had eleven rounds left and six officers with varying amounts less than that, all of this and a formation of the hulking aliens coming up Madison.
“Reloading!” he called, knowing that at this rate, he probably wouldn’t be making it out of this alive.
And I finally convinced finally convinced her to go out for drinks…
He was pulled out his regrets by a strangely familiar voice, reciting a poem, followed by a wave of green light from the portal above Stark tower, the light washing over all of them, running along the barrel of his service weapon and kept going, down through the mechanism and out the other end, and what he was holding when it stopped was not the weapon he’d started the morning with.
It was a giant ornate revolver, humming with the same frequency as the light coming off the sky above the tower, changed into something that his hands recognized as a firearm and his eyes couldn’t fully classify.
He looked down the line.
Every weapon his officers were holding had changed.
Service pistols extended into construct carbines.
Shotguns became something heavier and more deliberate.
Officer Ramirez was staring at the rotating barrels that had materialized around what had recently been a patrol rifle, her expression moving through several stages of processing.
“Davis,” she said.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
“You think it was that green guy that’s been zipping all ov—”
“Ramirez.”
“Yeah?”
“Light them up.”
The minigun spun up.
The avenue disappeared beneath a river of green bullets, and the formation coming up Madison had approximately two seconds to form an opinion about that before the opinion became irrelevant.
“—Beware My Power—”
Angelica was running on fumes and she knew it, the heat bleeding past her control in ways it hadn’t done since she was thirteen and still learning what she was, the way she was feeling she guessed she had maybe ten minutes of sustained output left before she had to land and recover or risk hurting someone she was trying to protect.
She put what she had into the next skiff and watched it come apart, the aliens locking up and falling to the ground bonelessly at the bursts of electronic destroying radiation she fired at them.
She turned to find Paulie standing in the street below her absorbing a volume of plasma fire that would have leveled the block if it had hit anything else, his arms spread wide and his expression cheerful.
“Need a little help?!” she called down.
“I can do this all day!” he called back, and laughed, and took another burst across the chest without flinching.
She heard a familiar bellow that sapped the joy from her, and she looked up.
The monster broke through the smoke from the north, low and fast, the scale of them never becoming normal no matter how many times you saw one, this one was bleeding from somewhere along its midsection, one of its fin structures damaged and dragging, but damaged didn’t mean slow and it didn’t mean done, as it descended it opened the armored plates along its underside and the aliens poured out of it like something being poured from a wound, dozens of them, hitting the pavement and the rooftops and the tops of the abandoned cars immediately orienting toward the civilians packed into the building.
People screamed.
The sound of it hit Angelica in the chest, a pulse of genuine terror that her body hadn’t learned to tune out and probably never would, for a half second she was back on the rooftop of the parking structure watching the last leviathan’s shadow cross the concrete before half of them were gone, the fear that moved through her in that half second was not a small fear.
She knew what these things did to groups of people, she had watched it happen once today already.
The civilians behind her were pressed against the building’s interior walls, the ones who couldn’t fit inside flattening themselves against the building’s exterior, and Rosario was moving through them trying to find some space for them to run into. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
Paulie was already moving toward the Chitauri hitting the pavement, his body absorbing the first volley of fire, but there were too many of them and they were spreading too fast the leviathan was still descending with more to release.
Angelica looked at it.
She thought about the last one, about the sound it had made when it hit the parking structure the nineteen who had made it out and the twenty one who hadn’t.
She thought about Zeke standing in the rubble below the construct’s hand telling her she was the most important person on the street.
She thought about all of them counting on her to still be that person.
Her hands came up.
“Firestar!” Paulie’s voice came from below her, sharp and urgent in a way his voice almost never was.
“Don’t!”
She flew toward the leviathan anyway.
The heat built in her palms as she closed the distance, not precise the way it was when she had room to calibrate, just concentrated, everything she had left compressed into the smallest possible point aimed at the creature’s damaged midsection where the armor was already compromised.
She was calculating the angle, was maybe thirty feet from optimal range, when she heard his voice echoing throughout the island, and with his words another shadow fell across her from above.
She looked up.
The hand appeared out of nowhere, descending at a speed that didn’t match its size, and it connected with the leviathan’s jaw from below in a single clean upward motion that snapped the creature’s head back and redirected its entire mass skyward with a crack that she felt in her sternum from thirty feet away.
The leviathan dropped from the sky, sliding on the ground for a couple of feet before the mech stopped with its foot, dust from the torn up road blowing past it as it emerged.
Its outline resolving from vague to specific as the dust cleared, broad-shouldered and deliberate and built from the same deep vivid green that had been holding the sky closed above Stark Tower.
The Chitauri that had been pouring toward us stopped, before roaring and firing at the mech.
The mech looked unfazed as the lasers washed over it, then it looked at Angelica, hovering thirty feet away with her hands still raised and the heat still built in her palms, and she didn’t know how a construct communicated recognition, but it did.
Below her Paulie’s laugh came up from the street, enormous and uncontained.
“I knew the kid had one more in him!”
She threw both fists in the air before she’d consciously decided to.
“THAT’S ZEKE!”
“—GREEN LANTERN’S LIGHT!”
My eyes opened, burning green and the island of Manhattan glowed that same green beneath me.
Not because the constructs were everywhere, though they were, because the people were, every act of stubbornness and refusal and terrified courage still happening on every avenue and rooftop and street corner in a city that had been hit as hard as anything hit it and had not stopped being itself.
The ring answered all of it.
Its light spread across Manhattan, not outward from a single source but through, moving along the lines of every decision to keep going that was still being made below me.
I understood something then that I hadn’t understood when Kilowog was explaining it, that I maybe couldn’t have understood until I felt it from the inside.
The oath hadn’t charged the ring, I hadn’t used a lantern, it had reminded me what powered me.
Not my will.
Ours.
The saw blades erupted from the face of the vault door on the portal’s side, hard green light spinning in a wide churning array that filled the space between the construct’s panels and the portal’s edges, and the Chitauri pressing against the other side of the barrier were mulched in a meaty blue mist.
The mothership’s cannon charged.
I looked at it through the gaps, at the barrel pointed directly at the construct’s center, I planted my feet in the air, and held up the sky.
Authors Note: That’s it for chapter four, I had half the mind to split this up into two chapters, but I decided against it, I’ve also used this chapter as a chance to experiment with third person point of views, tell me if they read well or not.
Killowog showed up, or an avatar of him anyway, the reason why, and the how will be addressed later.
I’m not happy with the Kate Bishop cameo, but I needed to put some respect on Hawkeyes name, I feel like people don’t realize how much of an accomplished combatant that dude is, he is basically Bullseye without the psychopathy.