“Alright,” I said.
“killing these things isn’t enough…” I looked at the ring in my hand, feeling half crazy for even talking to this thing.” You got any ideas?”
[Species designation: Unknown.]
[Bipedal reptilian lifeforms exhibiting extensive cybernetic augmentation.]
[Observed neural scarring consistent with invasive control interfaces and forced integration of machine systems.]
[Armor configuration optimized for mass deployment rather than individual survivability.]
[Units do not exhibit independent command behavior.]
[Behavioral patterns indicate networked cognition.]
[Individual organisms function as terminal nodes within a larger command architecture.]
[Signal origin traced beyond portal aperture.]
[Conclusion: hostile force operates as a tethered combat network.]
[Destruction of individual units will not significantly reduce operational capability.]
[Strategic recommendation: eliminate network source.]
[Threat designation: non-sapient combat drones.]
[Lethal force authorized under Green Lantern Corps War Protocols.]
I looked at the portal.
At the leviathans still coming through it.
At the skiffs still flooding out in formation.
“So if someone closes the portal.”
[The network collapses. Confirmed.]
“Great,” I said.
“Somebody needs to close the portal.”
I filed that away and dropped back into the fight.
The next ten minutes were the most purely physical thing I had ever done in my life, and I had once held a man’s body weight on my back for six hours straight during a wilderness survival course that I had also technically failed.
The ring did not get tired the way muscles got tired but concentration had its own kind of exhaustion and I was burning through it at a rate the ring informed me of, whenever I asked.
[Charge: 76%]
A cluster of ground troops had pinned a group of civilians behind an overturned bus on 44th and I came down on them from above with a construct that I can only describe as a giant green boxing glove, a fist the size of a car descending from thirty feet up and hitting the cluster with enough force to clear the entire intersection in one impact.
The civilians stared up at me.
“Subway,” I said.
“Go.”
They went.
[Charge: 73%]
Three skiffs working in coordination on 46th, running a pattern designed to keep anything on the ground pinned.
I came in from the east at full speed and deployed a construct barrier across the avenue, a solid green wall that the lead skiff hit at speed and crumpled against.
The second one pulled up in time.
The third didn’t.
I had a rotating buzzsaw construct up and moving before the second one finished its evasive bank, hard green light spinning at a speed that the skiff’s hull was not designed to argue with, and it came apart in a shower of alien metal and blue-white sparks.
[Charge: 69%]
I found a group of maybe twenty civilians trapped on the third floor of a parking structure, the ground floor swarming with Chitauri ground troops that had already started making their way up the stairwell.
I put a barrier across the stairwell entrance at the second floor landing, hard green light filling the gap wall to wall, and felt the impacts against it immediately as the troops below registered the obstruction and started throwing themselves at it.
Each hit registered through the ring like a knock on a door.
[Barrier integrity: holding. Recommend expediting civilian extraction.]
“Working on it,” I muttered.
I materialized a construct slide from one of the third floor windows, a long smooth ramp of hard green light angling down to street level, and got the first civilian onto it before the group had fully processed what they were looking at.
Once the first one went the rest followed, the way people followed when someone in front of them made the decision for them, sliding down in a steady stream while I held the barrier against the growing number of impacts from below.
The last one hit the street.
I released the barrier.
The Chitauri poured up through the stairwell immediately, the whole group of them surging toward the now empty third floor, realizing in the same moment that their targets were gone and turning toward the windows where I was still hovering, and I had a construct already forming in my hand when something displaced the air directly beside my head with a sound like a very large object moving very fast.
The hammer hit the first one in the chest.
Then it hit the second one.
Then the third, the fourth, the fifth, bouncing between them and through them impossibly, each impact a dull concussive crack that echoed off the parking structure’s concrete walls, bodies going down and staying down as the hammer worked its way through the entire group in the time it took me to register what was happening.
Then it reversed direction and flew back the way it had come.
I turned and found some jacked dude, wearing an honest to God cape a bit of a distance north, hand extended, the hammer returning to his grip.
He caught it without looking, already turning toward the next target, the red cape swinging wide with the movement.
I stared at the empty stairwell.
At the twenty Chitauri soldiers who were no longer a problem.
“Huh,” I said..
He eventually started swinging the hammer in a tight fast moving circle, looked across the avenue at me, and gave a single nod of acknowledgment which I returned as he then literally threw himself into the air, flying away.
[Charge: 61%]
Stark’s voice came through the comms eventually.
“Hey, Glowstick.” He said it the way he said everything, like he’d already decided on the nickname and was simply informing me of the fact.
“Need you to rendezvous with me and a couple of friendlies. Park Avenue and East 42nd. We need a gameplan.”
“Yeah, sure” I said.
“On my way.”
I came in from the north, dropping altitude as I crossed 45th, and I saw them before I fully registered what I was seeing.
Six of them.
Standing in the intersection of Park and 42nd like the avenue had been cleared specifically for the occasion, which, given the collective firepower on display, it basically had been.
They were dispatching the Chitauri that kept pushing into the intersection.
Iron Man I recognized.
The red and gold suit tracking targets and firing at anything that remotely even looked like an alien.
The guy with the cape and the hammer, who I’d just shared a nod with on 44th, was now bringing said hammer down on a cluster of ground troops with an enthusiasm that suggested he was either very angry or having the time of his life, and I genuinely couldn’t tell which.
The woman in the black tactical suit moved through the aliens like she was in an action movie.
Her suit fit in a way that suggested it was designed for movement first and everything else second.
I made a conscious decision to keep my eyes on her face.
The guy with the bow and arrows was, I had to acknowledge, inexplicably effective.
There was no logical reason that a man with a bow and arrows should be holding his own in the same intersection as a literal behemoth and a flying suit of powered armor and yet there he was, moving through the chaos with a calm deliberate precision that suggested he was used to operating in chaotic warzones.
A big guy with a round shield, moving with a discipline and a physicality that I recognized from old war documentaries they made us sit through in high school, was carving through the ground troops.
And the Hulk.
The Hulk was standing in the middle of the intersection doing what the Hulk did, which was being the most terrifying thing on the street, and the Chitauri were learning this lesson in real time.
The insane thing, the thing that I noticed as I came down into the intersection and landed at the edge of the group, was that they weren’t doing it on purpose.
Nobody had arranged them.
Nobody had staged it.
They were just standing in the natural positions that six people took when they were fighting outward from a central point, each one covering a sector, each one doing exactly what they were best at, and the result looked like something out of a movie poster.
Back to back to back to back to back to back, dispatching aliens, in the middle of a New York intersection.
I hovered at the edge of it for a second and took it in.
“You’re late, Glowstick,” Stark said, without looking at me.
“I was busy,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
Then he gestured around the group.
“Alright, since you’re joining the party. The woman who could kill you fourteen different ways before you finished that sentence is Natasha, call sign Black Widow. Legolas over there goes by Hawkeye, don’t let the arrows fool you, unfortunately he’s competent.” The archer didn’t look up from the Chitauri he was currently putting an arrow through.
“Pointbreak with the cape is Thor.”
I looked at the guy with the hammer.
“Like the actual Thor?” I said.
“The God?”
“Small g, but yeah, I’m still not fully on board with that myself,” Stark said, “but he keeps doing things with that hammer that are very difficult to argue with.”
“I am indeed Thor Odinson,” Thor apparently, said.
“Son of Odin. Prince of Asgard.”
“Uhh…Aight. Green Lantern, good to meet you.” I said.
“Jolly Green Giant over there is the Hulk.” Stark pointed at the enormous green figure currently holding a Chitauri soldier by the ankle and using it to hit another Chitauri soldier.
The Hulk’s chest rumbled at the nickname, a sound that I felt more than heard, somewhere between a growl and a warning.
“And Stars and Stripes over there is Steve Rogers, Captain America.”
I looked at the guy with the round shield.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Like the actual Captain America? Not some guy in a costume doing PR appearances?”
“The one and only,” Stark said.
Rogers looked at me, as I stopped floating up above them and touched down onto the ground.
“It’s good to meet you,” he said, as I unintentionally reached out my hand for a handshake.
“I watched a documentary about you in eighth grade,” I said.
“We had to write a paper.”
“I…hope you got a good grade,” he said as he gave me a firm shake of the hand.
“I got a C minus,” I said.
“No offense but, how are you even alive?”
“It’s a long story…” He said a bit somberly, and I realized I touched a bit of a sore spot
Stark made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
“You want to take a moment? Maybe get a photo? Because we are currently being invaded and you’re more starstruck by the guy from Brooklyn than you are by the literal Asgardian god standing four feet to your left.”
“Ain’t no one from New York that isn’t a Steve Rogers fan. Uh… no offense to you, Your Highness?”
Thor barked out a laugh, deep enough that I felt it through distance between us.
“None taken.” He rolled his shoulders, spinning Mjolnir once in his hand.
“Captain Rogers is a warrior worthy of admiration. I have fought beside him and already he has my trust.” His grin widened.
“As for titles, we stand upon the same battlefield. Any man willing to face an army from the stars one his lonesome has earned the right to call me Thor.”
He glanced toward the portal where another wave of Chitauri poured through.
“Besides, if we survive this day, there shall be time enough for formalities.”
A beat.
“And if we do not, they seem rather pointless.”
Captain America glanced over at me, his eyes moving to the symbol on my chest, to the green light still coming off the suit, and his expression moved through several things quickly before settling.
“You’re the one whose been helping people?” he asked.”Yeah,” I said.
He nodded once, “Good job, we’ve been hearing chatter over the comms about a green comet helping civilians to safety.”
“Alright,” Iron Man said, and the faceplate came up, and Tony Stark looked at me directly for the first time with the eyes of a man who was already three steps ahead of every conversation he was in.
“Now that we’ all know each other, does somebody want to explain to me how we close that portal?”
Captain America turned to look at me properly.
Up close he was bigger than the documentaries suggested, which was saying something.
“Before we get to that.” He nodded toward me.
“Not to be rude son but I need to know what exactly you are capable of, what are you bringing to this? I saw the robot on my way in. That was your doing?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“Dismissed it. Too much charge to maintain during a sustained fight.”
“Charge?” he repeated.
“Energy. My abilities are dependent on it.” I held up my hand, the green light steady around the band.
“As long as I have enough of it, anything I can clearly imagine becomes a real physical object. Hard light. I can make it as big or as small as I need it, as simple or as complicated.” I paused.
“Within limits.”
The silence that followed that explanation had a specific quality to it.
I watched it move through all of them in sequence, Stark’s eyes sharpening with a focus I couldn’t quiet place, Hawkeye’s expression doing something careful and evaluating, Black Widow raising an eyebrow at me.
Thor and the Hulk didn’t seem to particularly care either way.
Rogers looked at me steadily for a moment.
“Anything you can imagine.”
“Anything I can imagine clearly enough. Detail matters. Concentration matters.” I glanced at the portal still churning out enemies.
“I dismissed the construct because maintaining something that size while fighting independently was pulling too much at once. Wasn’t efficient.”
“Okay,” Rogers said, and I could see him filing it, categorizing it, already thinking about where it fit into what came next.
“What else?”
“Barriers. Constructs for offense. I can fly. Scan things, get information on things I’m looking at.” I looked away from the portal, towards Iron Man.
“Which is actually relevant to your question.”
Stark’s eyes moved to the portal.
“Go on.”
“These things,” I started.
“Chitauri,” Thor said.
He said it the way someone said a word they had been waiting to use, with the specific weight of someone who recognized the enemy by name.
“They are called the Chitauri.”
“Yeah I knew that alre—”
I stopped.
Something snagged in the back of my skull.
Clean and sharp and wrong in a specific way I recognized from the DMS sessions, from the dreams, from the moments where something surfaced from the other life without warning and didn’t fit the shape of my actual history.
I knew that already.
I had known that name before Thor said it.
I had known it the way I knew things from that other life, the way I had known the face on the couch watching cartoons with me that wasn’t Jeff’s face and wasn’t anyone I had ever met in this life.
I had known the name Chitauri the way I had known things I had no business knowing, and I had used it all morning without once stopping to ask myself how I knew it.
The dreams.
The other guy’s memories bleeding through at the edges, the way they always did when things got intense enough, the way they had been doing with increasing frequency since the ring landed on my finger.
How much did I know that I didn’t know I knew.
“Son.” Rogers’ voice was calm and direct, the kind of calm that came from long practice at not adding to the panic in a situation.
“You alright?”
I realized I had been staring at nothing for several seconds.
“Yeah.” I shook my head once.
“Yeah, sorry. Just the day catching up to me.” I pushed it back behind the locked door with everything else and looked at Stark.
“What I was trying to say is that the Chitauri are basically bioweapons. Drones. They operate through a hivemind, centrally controlled, and networked through the portal. Individual units don’t make independent decisions, they’re tethered. You cut that connection, you stop all of them simultaneously.”
“How do you know that?” Her voice was measured, not hostile, but not soft either.
“You don’t trust easy, do you…” It wasn’t really a question.
“I already said, I can scan targets and pull information. Biological composition, structural weak points, operational parameters.” I looked at her steadily, hoping she wouldn’t pick up on the omission.
“I wouldn’t make this up. Stark is right. We need to shut that portal. Cut the connection, stop the network, end the war.”
She held my gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, the way people did when they were deciding something.
Then she nodded once, which I was already learning was as much as she gave.
Rogers didn’t waste time.
He looked at each of us in turn, quick and clean, the way someone looked at a situation they had already assessed and were now solving, and when he spoke it had the specific gravity of someone whose voice people had been following into impossible things for a very long time.
“All right. Listen up.” He pointed up at the portal.
“Until we can close that, we need containment. Thor, Green Lantern, I want you bottlenecking that portal. Slow them down. You’ve got the lightning and you’ve got the constructs. Light the bastards up.”
Thor rolled his shoulders and gripped the hammer like he’d been waiting for permission.
Rogers turned.
“Hawkeye. That roof. Eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays, we need eyes on Loki.”
Hawkeye was already moving, an arrow nocked, not looking back.
“Natasha. You’re with me. We hold the ground here and we keep it.” He looked at Stark.
“Stark, find me a way to close that portal.”
“Already working on it,” Iron Man said, and the faceplate came down.
Then Rogers tilted his head back and looked up at the Hulk.
The Hulk looked down at him.
Bared his teeth slowly, the expression sitting somewhere between a grin and a warning, the sheer scale of him casting a shadow across half the intersection.
Rogers held his gaze for a moment.
“Hulk,” he said.
The Hulk’s eyes narrowed.
“Smash.”
What happened next was less a deployment and more a natural disaster making a decision.
The grin that split the Hulk’s face was savage, immediate and total.
He bent his knees once, launched himself skyward with a force that cracked the asphalt of the intersection in a perfect circle beneath his feet, and hit the side of a building halfway up with both fists and launched from it towards a cluster of ground troops.
The Chitauri on that block had a very bad thirty seconds.
The group dispersed.
Thor was already rising, the hammer trailing lightning.
Natasha and Rogers moved into the street in opposite directions with the coordinated ease of people who had been in enough situations like this to not need to discuss it.
I didn’t move.
I stood in the emptying intersection and looked up at the portal, at the bruised churning vortex above Stark Tower, at the leviathans still forcing their way through it with the patient unstoppable rhythm of a tide that didn’t know how to stop coming in.
Rogers was four steps away when he noticed I hadn’t moved.
He stopped.
“Green Lantern?”
“I can block it,” I said.
He turned back.
“What?”
“The portal.” I didn’t look away from it.
“I can form a barrier in front of it. Keep more from coming through. Buy you time to close it from the inside.”
A pause.
Thor who had been about to take off, stopped spinning his hammer and asked.
“How long could you hold?”
“That’s the thing.” I watched another leviathan push its way through the vortex, slow and massive and inevitable.
“I don’t know. I’ve had these powers for less than an hour. I don’t have a ceiling for it yet.” I finally looked at them.
“It could be ten minutes. It could be less.”
“And you?” Captain America asked me
“What about me?”
“If the barrier breaks while you’re up there maintaining it.” He said it plainly, the way he said everything, without softening it.
“What happens to you.”
I thought about that for a second…genuinely thought about it.
“I don’t know that either,” I said.
Rogers looked at me for a long moment.
The look of someone who understood exactly what was being said because he had said versions of it himself.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“That’s not an order. If you don’t think it holds, if the math doesn’t work—”
“It’s not about the math.” I swept a hand toward Manhattan.
The fires.
The collapsing buildings.
The people still fighting in the streets.
Alvarez.
Paulie.
Firestar.
The EMT who’d spent the last hour elbow-deep in other people’s blood.
Every scared bastard who’d decided today wasn’t the day New York died.
“It’s not about whether it goes well for me. It’s about what happens to all of this if nobody tries.” I paused.
“You need time to close it. I can give you that time. nuff said.”
They were quiet for a moment, but it was Thor who broke that silence.
When he finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its usual humor.
“A fortress.”
I blinked.
“What?”
He gestured toward the symbol on my chest, a circle surrounded by two walls “That is what you build.”
His blue eyes met mine.
“Not weapons, nor glory, but a bastion.” The word hit harder than he would ever know.
Thor nodded once.
“Many warriors seek to become the spear.” His gaze drifted toward the portal.
“Few choose to become the wall.”
His hammer started spinning again in his hand.
“Hold the line, Green Lantern.” Lightning crawled across his armor.
“And we shall bring down the gate.”
Authors Note: That’s it for Chapter 3 of Brightest Day, and honestly this one got away from me in the best possible way.
What was supposed to be a straightforward action chapter turned into something a lot bigger than I planned, and I think it’s better for it.
Zeke finally has the ring, finally has the suit, and we got to see him go toe to toe with an alien army and hold his own, which felt like the payoff this story has been building toward since Chapter 1.
For those of you waiting on the oath, I hear you.
I had a whole scene planned for it in this chapter and it just would not fit without feeling rushed, so I made the call to push it to Chapter 4 where it can land the way it deserves to.
Trust me on that one.