Behind me the mech construct tracked my movement, staying oriented toward me, the shielded hand holding the civilians steady while the other arm swatted a skiff out of its immediate airspace with a backhand that sent it tumbling into the facade of an office building two blocks east.
We worked like that, the first two minutes since our exodus were closer to controlled chaos than actual tactics, but the ring filled the gaps between what I knew and what I needed to know.
Green missiles lanced out from the construct’s shoulders in steady bursts, tracking the skiffs that tried to flank us from behind.
When a leviathan came in low I had the construct meet it with a one handed shove that redirected its mass into a building that had already been evacuated and was not going to miss its ground floor.
We were moving the whole time.
That was the priority the ring kept pushing and I agreed with it, every second we spent over the same piece of avenue was another second every incoming target had to zero in on us.
I pushed the construct south and west, away from the tower, away from the densest part of the formation, and the ring cleared the path ahead of us with precise targeted bursts that took out the skiffs trying to cut off our route before they got close enough to threaten the shield.
[Bearer. Incoming contact. Human. Powered armor. Unidentifiable energy signature.]
I tracked it automatically.
A red and gold shape banking hard off the side of a building three blocks north, adjusting course toward us at a speed that the Chitauri skiffs genuinely couldn’t match.
It crossed the distance between us in about four seconds and pulled up into a hover maybe thirty feet away, close enough that I could see the chest piece glowing, close enough that the repulsors were audible even over everything else happening in the sky above Midtown.
The faceplate was down.
I couldn’t see his face.
And thanks to this get up I had on, neither could he see mine.
[Incoming communication. Attempting frequency breach. Proceed?]
“Yeah,” I said.
“Put him through.”
A click.
Then a voice I recognized from approximately a thousand news cycles and one very memorable Senate hearing.
“So.” Tony Stark’s voice carried the natural sarcastic lilt of a man who had things come easy to him.
“Giant green robot. Glowing green suit…hard light constructs if I’m reading the energy signature right, which I am, I’m always right. No emitters I can see though, no external power source, no visible tech infrastructure of any kind…other then that ring on your hand.”
A beat.
“The construct’s holding a coherent photonic structure without any apparent containment field which should be physically impossible given the size of it.” Another beat, shorter.
“You’ve got a whole theme going. Very committed to the green. Consistent branding, I respect it. Who exactly am I talking to right now?”
A skiff came in low on my left and I swatted it out of the air with the construct’s free arm without breaking stride, the impact sending it spinning into the side of a building in a shower of sparks and alien debris.
“This is, uh.” I looked down at the suit.
At the symbol on my chest.
At the ring still glowing on my finger.
“Green Lantern. I’m just trying to get some civilians and injured combatants clear of the portal.”
A beat of silence.
“Green Lantern…” he repeated.
“It’s a new development.”
“The name?”
“The whole thing actually.”
Three skiffs broke from the formation to the north and came at us in a tight V.
I raised my free hand and the ring put a wide construct barrier between them and us, the energy blasts detonating against it in rapid succession, bright and useless.
I concentrated a bit and the wall formed spikes, I then pushed the barrier from behind with a concentrated lance of green light that took out the lead skiff, and the formation scattered.
“Oh come on,” Tony said.
“Now you’re just showing off.” He banked alongside me, matching my pace, and I felt the scan, a faint tickle against the ring’s spatial awareness, something probing the construct’s energy signature with very sophisticated instruments.
“So how does it work?” he said.
“Because the energy requirements for a construct that size alone, the photonic coherence without a containment field, the output frequency, it’s not like anything I’ve ever encountered before, is it a programmable energy lattice? Nanotech? Cosmic nonsense? Please don’t say cosmic nonsense.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start explaining that, I’m not sure I even get what it is you’re asking me…”
A leviathan rolled in from the east, slow and massive, angling toward the construct’s shielded hand.
I clocked it, felt the civilians through the ring, and made a decision.
I concentrated and pulled the shielded bubble back, repositioning it further behind us away from the immediate engagement zone, buying them distance from the worst of it.
The construct went two-handed, free of the shielding responsibility now, and I brought both arms up to meet the leviathan before it closed the distance.
The fingers closed around the creature’s midsection with a grinding pressure that stopped several thousand tons of alien momentum dead in the air.
The thing thrashed, its whole body working against the grip, tail whipping wide enough to take out a chunk of a building’s upper floors, and I felt the ring compensate steadily, pouring charge into the construct’s hands until the leviathan simply ran out of leverage to work with.
Then I threw it straight up.
While it was disoriented, tumbling end over end against the smoke-filled sky, I had the construct bring both fists together and draw them apart slowly, and in the growing space between the palms the green energy built and concentrated and stretched, pulling into a shape that resolved into a blade the length of a city block, hard light ground to an edge that caught the portal’s blue glow and threw it back across the avenue.
The construct jumped.
The sword came down.
The leviathan came apart in two pieces and hit the street below with a sound like a building falling, purple blood painting the avenue in a wide radius that I was already moving away from.
A beat of silence on the comms.
“Jesus, kid.” Stark’s voice had shifted.
The skepticism was still there but it had reorganized itself around something that sounded a lot like genuine interest fighting its instinct to stay unimpressed.
“You could’ve just shot the thing.”
“Was working out some frustration if I’m being honest.” I said.
“Fair point. Alright, Glowstick. Where are you trying to get your people to?”
…
Fuck he just call me?
“I’m trying to put some distance between them and your tower,” I said, after deciding now wasn’t the time to try and bump heads with the billionaire, and started to gesture toward the portal.
“What even is going on anyway?” I asked.
“You do this?”
The silence that followed was tense.
“Did I,” Stark said.
Very slowly.
With the energy of a man choosing his words carefully because the alternative was saying something much less measured.
“Did I open a portal above my own tower and invite an alien army into Midtown Manhattan.”
“Wouldn’t be the worst thing a billionaire did.”
“No,” he said. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
“I did not do this. I am actively trying to undo this. There is a meaningful difference between those two things and I want it acknowledged.”
“Yeah sure, ‘acknowledged’. So who did this?”
“Guy called Loki.” The name came out with the specific flatness of someone who had already spent significant emotional energy on this particular individual and had run dry.
“The guy from Munich?” I asked remembering the viral video I had seen earlier today.
“The very same, thinks he’s going to conquer the Earth, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not something I have ever put on my schedule and do not intend to accommodate.” A beat.
“He had a device called the Tesseract. Extremely powerful energy source. He used it to open the portal and the army came through it and here we are having this lovely conversation while your city gets taken apart underneath us.”
Two skiffs came screaming in from opposite sides simultaneously dragging us from the conversation, a coordinated pincer running both flanks at once.
I didn’t have time to fully react.
I got the shield reinforced on the civilian side, the green dome thickening in the half second before the first blast hit it and detonated uselessly against the hard light.
I felt it through the ring.
Not pain exactly.
More like a structural notification arriving with some urgency, a sharp drop in the integrity reading, a crack propagating through the hard light from the point of impact that I had to actively push charge into to keep from spreading further up the arm.
[Charge remaining: 84%. Construct integrity: 79%. Recommend evasive action.]
“Little busy,” I muttered.
Stark was already on the two skiffs, a repulsor blast taking out the right one cleanly while I rebuilt the construct’s shoulder and swung the left arm in a wide arc that connected with the second skiff and sent it tumbling.
We fell into a rhythm without discussing it, him clearing the fast movers on the flanks while the construct handled anything that came in heavy from the front, and for about forty five seconds it actually worked the way things occasionally worked in the middle of disasters, two people who had never met operating in sync because the situation didn’t leave room for anything else.
Then I caught movement in my peripheral.
A jet.
Black, angular, moving with the kind of deliberate low profile that didn’t belong to anything commercial or military I recognized.
It cut through the smoke above the avenue at speed, heading directly for Stark Tower, and I tracked it automatically, the ring pulling its silhouette into focus.
It wasn’t Chitauri.
The design was too intentional, too human in its construction, and it was moving with the specific directional certainty of something that knew exactly where it was going and why.
It reached the tower and pulled into a hover above the balcony, engines cycling down to a hold, and then opened up on the upper floors with a strafing run that lit up the glass facade in a long stuttering line of impacts.
Going after whoever was inside.
Whoever had opened the portal.
I watched it work for about three seconds.
Then a lance of energy came screaming out of somewhere in the tower’s upper floors and caught the jet’s left wing with a precision that didn’t look accidental.
The wing sheared.
The jet pitched hard, lost the hover, and came down in a long ugly arc that ended somewhere on the ground floor of the building in a sound I felt more than heard from two blocks away.
I looked at Stark.
He had already turned toward the crash site, the suit’s posture shifting into something more purposeful.
“Friend of yours?” I asked.
“No,” Stark said.
Then, after a pause that had something complicated in it: “But one of them used to be my secretary.”
He peeled off without elaborating, the red and gold suit banking hard back toward the tower, and I watched him go for exactly one second before turning back to the task in front of me.
Hell’s Kitchen was west and the avenue that way was the clearest I’d seen since this whole thing started, the battle having pulled most of its weight toward the tower and left the blocks further out in a strange bruised quiet broken only by distant explosions and the occasional Chitauri skiff making a lone pass before returning to the main formation.
I pushed the construct that direction, moving low and steady, the shielded hand held out in front of me, and covered the distance in under two minutes.
The street I set them down on was as close to empty as Midtown was going to get today.
A few abandoned cars.
A bodega with its gate half pulled down.
The distant wail of sirens that had been the city’s background music all morning.
I brought the construct’s hand down slowly, felt the nineteen of them through the ring as the palm touched the asphalt, and let the shield dissolve.
They climbed out one by one, some of them helping others, Paulie lifting the woman who had been crying down from the edge of the platform with a gentleness that didn’t match his size.
Alvarez hopped down on his good foot and immediately looked around for threats out of what I was starting to understand was just how he was built.
Rosario the EMT hit the ground and started checking people before she’d fully caught her balance.
I landed in front of them and the construct settled behind me, still and patient, its green light casting long shadows down the avenue.
They looked at me.
All nineteen of them, battered and dust-grey and exhausted, looking at the man in the glowing green suit who had just carried them out of a collapsed building in the hands of a giant mech warrior.
I didn’t have a speech prepared.
I wasn’t sure I had the energy for one.
“You did good today,” I said.
“All of you.” I looked across their faces, at the EMT with dried blood on her forehead, at the civilians who had fought a war with stolen rifles, at the construction workers, at the security guards in their mall cop windbreakers.
“Thank you for fighting with me, and I’m sorry it ended how it did.”
Nobody said anything for a moment, what could they even say to that, so I continued on.
“But I need you to listen to me right now because that portal is still open and this isn’t over.” I said it straight, no sugarcoating.
They’d earned the truth.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better and this street is far enough from the tower that you’ve got time, but not unlimited time. Get inside. Stay low. Find a basement if you can.” I looked at Rosario.
“You’ve got wounded. Get them treated first.”
She was already nodding, already moving, already being exactly who she’d been all morning.
Then Firestar stepped out from the crowd in front of me, arms crossed, chin up, molten yellow eyes steady.
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
She said it the way teenagers said things they’d already decided something.
I looked at her.
Fifteen, maybe sixteen, hair still burning faintly at the ends, a small cut above her eyebrow that she hadn’t noticed or had decided not to care about.
“No,” I said.
Her jaw tightened.
“I can fight. You saw what I did up there.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“I know what you can do,” I said.
“That’s not why I’m saying no.”
“Then why—”
“Because they need someone to protect them.” I nodded toward the nineteen people behind her, lowering my voice so only she could hear.
“You’ve seen what they’re like. Paulie can absorb punishment sure, but the rest don’t got any fight in them anymore. If a skiff comes down this avenue in the next twenty minutes the thing standing between these people and getting killed is going to be you.” I held her gaze.
“You want to help, I get that, more than anyone I do, but this is where you can do the most good.”
She looked at the group.
At the woman who had been crying, who was now sitting on the curb with her head back and her eyes closed.
At the construction worker who was helping Rosario wrap someone’s arm.
At Alvarez, who had found a piece of debris to lean against and was watching the sky, at the sight of everyone something moved through Firestar’s expression.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“You did good today too,” I said.
“Seriously.”
She looked away like she didn’t know what to do with that, which told me she didn’t hear it often enough.
[Bearer. Alien activity increasing. Recommend returning to primary engagement zone.]
“Yeah,” I said.
“I know.”
I looked back at them one more time.
Nineteen people on a Hell’s Kitchen street who had been buried under a building twenty minutes ago.
Then I rose off the ground, let the mech dissolve behind me, and pointed myself back toward Midtown.
The construct released cleanly, the green light pulling back into the ring the way a breath pulled back into the chest, and I was just a man in a costume flying over Manhattan which was a sentence I never thought would apply to me.
The avenue below me was a warzone.
Overturned vehicles and blown out storefronts.
alien ground troops moved in clusters between the buildings, rounding corners, firing at anything that moved, and I dropped on them from above when I found them, a construct hammer forming in my hand and coming down on the cluster before they registered I was there, scattering them across the pavement, and then I was gone again, back up, moving east.
They really aren’t stopping.
That was the thing that kept asserting itself no matter how many I put down.
I’d been fighting for a while and the math hadn’t changed.
The portal kept producing them and the ones I was taking out weren’t even making a visible dent in the numbers attacking the city.
I dispatched another group of skiffs with a constructed giant shark tearing through them, before I sent it prowling through the streets to tear into the ground troops, and kept moving.
They really, genuinely are not stop-I was pulled out of my thoughts by the thunder.
It wasn’t the rolling atmospheric kind that built and arrived with warning.
This was sharp and immediate and localized, the specific crack of something massive and deliberate discharging in a single point, and the lightning bolt that followed it came down out of a sky with no clouds left and struck Stark Tower with enough force to light up every avenue for six blocks in both directions.
The shockwave hit me half a second later and I had a barrier up before I finished registering it, the green light catching the displaced air and holding me steady while debris and broken glass rained down across the avenue below.
When I looked at the tower the smoke was already clearing.
A red cape moved through the upper floors, heading deeper into the building, and I tracked it until the tower’s glass facade swallowed the shape entirely.
I held my position taking potshots at any alien that so much as looked in my direction.
Then movement at the balcony.
A skiff, moving fast, breaking away from the tower at an angle that wasn’t a patrol pattern, like something retreating.
On the skiff, a figure in gold and emerald armor.
Loki
I was already moving.
[Bearer. Pursuit vector calculated.]
“I see him,” I said.
I pushed everything the ring had into speed and closed the distance in seconds, the skiff growing from a speck to a real tangible thing in front of me, close enough to see the horned helmet, close enough that I had a construct forming in my hand already, something that would slow the skiff without destroying it because whatever was on that skiff needed to be stopped and held and answered for and I was not going to be the one to decide what happened after that—
The roar hit me like a physical object.
It came from somewhere below and to the east and it was a sound I had a frame of reference for.
It was deep and animal and enormous and it bounced off every building on the avenue simultaneously and filled the air with a frequency that I felt in my chest wall.
I had heard that sound exactly once before.
Four years ago.
On a news broadcast that I had watched from a bar in the Bronx with about thirty other people, all of them completely silent, watching the footage of two behemoths tearing up a street in Harlem.
The sound had come through the television speakers and deep in the city had everyone in that bar going very quiet and nobody had said anything for a long time after.
I knew what made that sound.
I looked toward its source anyway, because some part of me needed the confirmation, and a figure cleared the rooftops to the east and launched itself into open air with an easy, almost casual jump.
Green.
Massive.
Moving with the coiled, barely contained energy of something that was less organic being and more like a walking nuclear bomb.
It hit the leviathan on the way up.
It reached out mid-arc and grabbed the creature by the jaw with both hands and the impact of that grip stopping several thousand tons of alien organic mass mid-flight was an event that I felt in my back teeth from three blocks away.
The leviathan’s roar cut off instantly.
Then the Hulk, because it was absolutely the Hulk, brought the creature’s head down against the edge of a building with a sound that I had no word for and the leviathan went limp and fell.
I stared at it for a full two seconds.
Then I looked back toward where the skiff had been.
Empty sky.
I turned a full circle in the air, scanning every direction, searching for the gold and green armor, for the horned silhouette, for any trace of the skiff’s trajectory.
Nothing.
[Scanning for target. Armor signature: undetectable. Bio-signature: undetectable. Magic-based concealment suspected. Ring is unable to confirm location.]
“Fuck!” I said.
I hung in the air for a moment, looking at the space where the skiff had been, at the empty sky where the man who had started all of this had been thirty seconds ago, and I did the only thing I could do with that information, which was nothing.
You couldn’t chase what you couldn’t find.