I lay back on the rough stone of the Domo’s hull for a brief moment, panting, twitching and a little dazed, as the rest of the battle continued to play out above me. Below me? Whatever.
On the one hand, I had managed to hold onto my magic by the bare skin of my teeth, so my protection spell was still intact and I had thankfully not plummeted to my untimely demise. On the other hand, I now knew what it felt like to have my soul electrocuted.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t feel great.
As soon as my astral form had made contact with one of the golden threads of cosmic filigree that were woven through the structure of the spaceship, there’d been a discharge of energy that had lit me up like a bug caught in a bug zapper. I was just lucky it hadn’t just killed me outright… I remembered watching one of Kaecilius’s zealots have his soul explode when Doctor Strange had channelled the power from a defibrillator into him, even if I’d thought that that hadn’t made much sense at the time.
Part of me hazily wondered if that was a normal defence mechanism that had always been there, or if it was something that Phastos had deliberately put in place after Ikaris had told them about me ducking into the Astral a couple of times during our first fight. Surely—surely—Thena or Gil would have mentioned something like this when they were cautioning me about my use of the Astral Plane, had they known about it. Still, this sort of thing was probably one of the reasons that people had only used astral projection sparingly during the events of the original timeline.
There was a deep, resonant clang from below, loud enough that it was audible even over the rest of the chaos playing out a thousand feet below me. The noise snapped my mind back to the present. I groaned, reaching up to massage my temple with my fingers. God, every part of me felt raw after that.
Okay, so much for invading the ship astrally. What else could I do? I could stab the ship with my spear, carve out a point of leverage to work from and try to fracture part of the hull, but I had no idea where inside the massive stone structure the rooms or passages were. Knowing my luck, the part of the ship I was currently on was solid all the way through and I could waste a lot of time scrabbling at it before making proper headway.
The Domo itself was just an obstacle, though—what I actually needed to do was wreck the reality anchor and take Druig out of the equation. Giving the entire ship a good shake might break Druig’s concentration over the IAF forces for a moment, but his power worked fast and simply breaking it once would do nothing to prevent him from immediately reasserting control. The Domo was huge, but I was pretty strong… would it be possible for me to seize the whole thing with telekinesis and try to crack it in half? Or… my eyes flicked toward the darkened mountains looming on the horizon. If I couldn’t break the ship, could I overwhelm its engines? Crashing a giant alien spacecraft into the Himalayas sounded like it would look cool, but it also felt like the sort of thing that might have significant downsides.
“Taking a break already, Red?” Tony’s voice came through the comms.
Ah, here we go—modern problems required modern solutions. Blowing shit up was definitely much more of a Tony thing than a me thing. “Think you can crack this baby open for me?” I responded, forcing some steadiness into my voice as I struggled back to my feet, looking around to spot him.
“My pleasure.” As Tony came into view, a dozen small streaks of white shot from launchers embedded in the shoulders of his armour and raced ahead of him to slam into the underside of the Domo.
He’d aimed a relatively safe distance from me, twenty metres or so, but even still, I felt the flash of heat from the blast, flecks of chipped stone bouncing off my protection spell. I took a deep breath and darted toward the impact point, but pulled up short as the thin smoke cleared.
The micromissiles had gouged a crater-like scar in the surface of the spacecraft a couple of inches deep, exposing thinner, spider-web-like capillaries of golden cosmic energy within the dark green marble. Still no idea if there was even a room below it, though. Tony probably hadn’t realised how thick the hull would be.
I blinked. At first, I thought I was seeing some sort of optical illusion, like the crawling, rippling visual effect after staring at one of those spiralling designs, but after a moment I realised that the stone was—very slowly, millimetre by millimetre—starting to grow back. Weird and cool, but also very unhelpful.
Above/below me, Tony pulled up and paused, considering the damage thoughtfully for a moment. It was a little weird seeing him hovering upside down from my perspective. “Huh,” he said. “Thought that’d do more.”
Before either of us could decide on our next move, there was a tiny flicker of movement in my peripheral vision. I reflexively whipped out my free hand, a curtain of chaos magic protecting us as twin globes of cosmic energy slammed into it. With so little warning, I hadn’t been able to pour much into the shield, and it shattered under the force of the attacks.
Beyond the dissipating shreds of magic and cosmic energy, floating up to meet us, was Phastos. The Eternal was standing on a thin, circular platform of metal, and the clouds of devices encircling his arms had partially resolved into a pair of large blaster-like weapons at his clenched fists, currently pointed at us. “Stark,” he said, raising his voice so we could hear the disdain in his tone. “The ironmonger. People like you never change. Not really.”
Tony didn’t respond to Phastos immediately, speaking quietly on the comms channel in my ear instead. “Sterns?”
“Actually, the Iron Monger was another guy,” I called back for him, setting into a combat stance, magic glowing between my fingers and along the haft of my spear. “There was a whole thing.”
“Risky,” Sterns responded. “Seventy per cent, low confidence. I need better data on his capabilities.”
“It’ll have to do,” Tony brushed him off and raised his hands, repulsors already whining.
I flicked my hand out in a wide gesture, releasing a spiralling triad of chaos magic bolts to join his energy beams. Phastos was ready for us, however, and barely had to twitch his hands to make a flurry of small metallic constructs come together in front of him, projecting a wide wall of cosmic energy rippling with complicated Celestial designs.
Our attacks splashed harmlessly against the powerful barrier, then I barely had time to react to Tony’s “Uh oh,” as the Iron Man suit suddenly disassembled itself off his body, separating into its component parts and flying over to join the arrays of machinery orbiting Phastos’s arms.
My heart leapt into my throat as Tony immediately started to fall, but thankfully I was fast enough to reverse direction and pluck him out of the air, glimmering red telekinetic energy outlining his body. He flung his arms out awkwardly to either side, like he thought he needed to balance himself, and I brought him in close to me with a gesture. My shifted frame of reference asserted itself, inelegantly flipping him upside-down to settle on his rump on the underside of the Domo.
“If I had a nickel for every time I rescued you after you were dumped out of a stolen suit…” I murmured, watching Phastos cautiously as I played it off like Tony hadn’t just nearly plummeted to his death.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’d have two nickels, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.”
Phastos scoffed loudly, watching us from the other side of his barrier. “You attacked a technopath while wearing power armour. One who’d had a chance to look over your designs, even. That’s a level beyond ordinary human hubris, even for someone like you.”
Tony shrugged, carefully rising to his feet. He was playing it cool, but that had to have shaken him. His shoulders were slightly hunched and his eyes flicked ‘upwards’ briefly, as if he was expecting to fall again at any moment. “Yeah, well, I guess you could say I’m pro?hubris, broadly speaking,” he called back, raising his voice to be heard.
The red glimmers of magic around him dimmed and settled as I tied the effect off so I wouldn’t need to concentrate on it. Things were already going to be awkward enough with him up here without his suit, but I didn’t exactly have a reliable way of getting him to safety, either.
“You need to understand your limitations,” Phastos told him.
“What I understand is that we’re about to kick your ass.”
The Eternal shook his head in disbelief. “All of this and you still somehow think I should be scared of you, Stark?”
“Nah, that’s never really been my thing,” Tony replied with a small snort of amusement, then jerked a thumb toward me. “I think you should be scared of her.”
I took that as my cue, exploding forward in a powerful lunge, ignoring the ache in my soul left by the Domo’s defences. Phastos snapped off a pair of cosmic energy blasts with the cannons over his fists and I twisted my body to dart between them. Flipping myself a full hundred and eighty degrees, I landed in a crouch on his barrier, driving my spear downwards with both hands to pierce it like I was a Final Fantasy dragoon.
A painful, rattling shock numbed my arms as the spear stopped dead, failing to penetrate, but I was already moving again, trying to kip under the barrier, beneath Phastos’s feet. The shield reacted seemingly on its own, widening and rotating through the air around Phastos to keep itself interposed between the two of us as he tried to fire on me again. I changed tactics again, taking a hand off my spear to clench it into a fist, flexing my magic as I did so. Red glimmers of telekinetic energy briefly lit up along the Eternal’s arms before being almost immediately extinguished by a small burst of dispelling green fire.
Skittering over the surface of the barrier like a spider, I probed at it with spear and magic alike, trying to find some way through or around, my teeth gritted in frustration. I was struggling to come up with tactics that might actually work, here. Phastos’s anti-magic tech was super annoying, and I didn’t have the Ancient One here to deactivate it this time. The Eternal wasn’t just waiting for me to find a winning play, either—as I moved, the pieces of the Iron Man armour fanned out behind his head, reconfiguring into a set of four pillar-like structures that put me in mind of the trap launched by Veronica, the Hulkbuster’s floating support bay. Each pillar was tipped with a repulsor that immediately opened fire through his shield in a rotating array, seeking to carve their way through my own protections.
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I flinched back a little, but they were just standard repulsor beams, lacking the telltale blue burn of the vibranium-enhanced sonic designs that Eliza had pioneered. Huh. Weird, but I wasn’t going to complain—as it was, the beams put a bit of strain on my protection spell, but they were still manageable. It felt like a stalemate, neither of us seemingly able to penetrate the other’s defences.
Drawing deeply on my well of power, my eyes and hands flared red as I hammered a massive spike of telekinetic energy up into the shield, trying to overwhelm it with sheer force. Phastos barely even wobbled, sending a half-dozen anchors out to secure the shield against the stone hull above him with a wave of his hand. I sprang away, getting a little bit of distance between us as I changed tactics yet again. My magic flashed and bolts of chaos magic flicked out to either side of me, tracing wide arcs as they converged on my target, trying to hit him from multiple angles.
“Now!” Tony’s voice cracked through the air and, a bare instant later, Phastos disappeared as another explosion rocked the underside of the Domo.
I reeled backwards, buffeted by the shockwave, and did a little flip-tumble thing to land back on the stone hull, stumbling a few paces. Not too far away, Tony was pulling himself back to his feet—it looked like he’d dived to the ground when he’d given FRIDAY the order to self-destruct. I was honestly surprised he’d managed to sneak that past Phastos but, in retrospect, it seemed like that had been his plan all along. Huh.
Dark streaks shot out of the rapidly thinning smoke, a handful of key devices clicking back into place around Tony—partial gauntlets and sabatons on his hands and feet, repulsors already flaring to life; a spinal support column and chest plate holding an arc reactor; the sleek vibranium components all linked together into a skeletal, silver-black exosuit. It was no full Iron Man armour, but damn if it didn’t look cool.
Phastos’s shield had vanished, but I hadn’t seen him fall and I didn’t want to wait for him to recover. I lunged forward into the rapidly-dispersing smoke, but the Eternal still managed to catch the edge of my spear on one of his gauntlets. As visibility cleared, I could see that he was now standing upside-down on the scarred underside of the Domo just as I was: Thin metal braces had formed around his legs and feet, a faint golden glow coming from under the soles of his feet as he hung there. He pushed me back and tried to get a shield back up with a wave of his hand, but I slashed a pair of metal rings out of the air as they left his gauntlet then slammed the butt of my weapon into his face, sending him staggering backwards.
I went to follow up, pressing the advantage, when the stone underneath my feet exploded in a spray of marble shards and dust. Before I had time to react, something clamped, vice-like, around my ankle. I flailed briefly—disoriented—before being slammed bodily into the spacecraft’s hull, my protection spell protesting as I hit hard enough to crack the stone.
I jabbed blindly downward with the spear and, as I twisted to look at what had grabbed me, I saw a pair of golden, glowing eyes a moment before beams of cosmic energy ripped upwards across my already-stretched protections. My blood turned to ice-water, prickling in my veins. Fucking Ikaris? He was supposed to be asleep! This was… not good. Very extremely not good. The pressure from his grip was leaking painfully through my strained magical defences, the bones in my ankle protesting as they ground together.
I lashed out with a downward burst of telekinetic power, trying to swat him away from me, but with him holding on the way he was, all that did was blast us both away from the Domo and into a wild tumble in open air. In response, he gave me a violent shake, like an overstimulated dog that had gotten hold of a soft toy. I let out a choked scream as I felt something crunch and snap, a spike of white-hot pain running up my leg. I lost hold of my spear, losing sight of it almost immediately as it was flung from my grip.
The whine of repulsors cut through the air, underlined by the deep thrum of vibranium enhancement, and Ikaris pitched over forward in a spiralling tumble as a pair of staccato bursts slammed into the back of his head and shoulders. I cried out again as he dragged me along for the ride, my ankle twisting again in his hand. The threads of my protection spell were pulling apart at the seams, and I had the panicked thought that if I didn’t get Ikaris off me in the next few seconds, he might actually rip my foot off.
The Eternal turned, eyes glowing golden as Tony darted away and tried to weave between him and the ship. Heedless of any collateral damage, beams of power blasted from Ikaris’s face and raked across the underside of the Domo, tracing a path past Phastos and ploughing a deep furrow in the stone as he tracked the Avenger. It was difficult for me to really see what happened, but I thought Phastos might have clipped Tony with a blast from behind. Either way, next thing I knew, he was plummeting to the cityscape below.
Ikaris’s eyes were still glowing as he turned his head, obviously intent on finishing the job, and I flicked both hands out toward him to hit him with a pair of point-blank bolts of chaos magic. My vision went white and spotty for a moment as the blast once again threw us both around, the nerves in my tortured ankle shrieking in protest, but as Ikaris managed to reorient himself, his grip loosened and he finally let go.
I twisted in midair, a rush of relief flooding my body—my foot still felt like it was on fire, but I was free. The feeling was short-lived, however, as I realised that Ikaris had used the movement to dart in close and there wasn’t any time for me to dodge or block what was about to happen next. He was above me, arm pulled back, eyes clouded over with gold, and I had a bare instant to finally register something that I’d missed noticing until now: The glow still clouding his eyes wasn’t his eye beams about to fire again… it was Druig’s power. Then Ikaris twisted, putting all of his strength behind the hit as he backhanded me across the temple with a closed fist.
My protection spell shattered. My vision went white again and there was a gut-churning handful of seconds where the air screamed in my ears before I slammed into and through something. There was a sickly popping crunch in my left shoulder and then I was in empty air again, the speed of my immediate descent arrested slightly as I roughly tumbled toward the ground.
Fumbling as I tried to power through the pain, I seized myself in threads of magical power to slow my descent. I flipped myself over so I could look back the way I’d come, frantically trying to re-weave my protection spell, anticipating an immediate follow-up. But none came.
I managed to pull myself to a complete halt a scant couple of feet above a huge bas-relief sculpture, its black stone painted in bright colours, the pots and offerings set around it rattling and scattered by the sudden wind of my passage. Hazily, I realised that I recognised where I was—this was Durbar Square. Pietro and I had visited it when we’d been poking around the city looking for Kamar-taj the first time we’d come here. Ikaris had just bitch-slapped me halfway across the city like we were fucking Dragon Ball Z characters.
I was panting, cold sweat beading on my forehead, and I let myself take a few seconds to catch my breath, staring at the ragged hole my passage had punched through the third floor of the pagoda across the way. A temple of some kind? Probably. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but it still felt vaguely like I’d just accidentally committed some sort of cultural atrocity. How fast had I been going when I’d hit it? With no protection spell? Ikaris had punched me in the head, too. I felt pretty sure the only reason my skull wasn’t currently caved in was Thena’s helmet taking the brunt of both hits.
I glanced briefly around at the deserted square. It seemed as though Druig must have evacuated people to a safe distance while we’d been fighting, at least, so that was a minor upside.
“Tony? What’s happening?” I called through my comms, licking my lips to moisten them. The Domo was a dark, foreboding monolith hanging in the sky further beyond the pagoda, its underside lit briefly and intermittently by explosions and the shimmer of Kamar-taj’s magical shield, but I couldn’t pick out Ikaris or Phastos.
“Little busy, Red!” came the tight response. “You good?”
My left shoulder really hurt, and there was a tingly, dead sensation that had spread all the way down the arm. An attempt to move it met with, well, let’s optimistically call it ‘extremely limited success’. Only dislocated, probably, which was better than broken. As my protection spell slid safely back in place, I carefully netted a few more threads of magical power around my shoulder, and… crunch.
Ow.
I flexed my arm. It still hurt, but it was functional again. Which was a lot more than I could say for the ankle that Ikaris had definitely broken, my foot dangling limply below me. The throbbing, burning pain from it had sort of evolved into a white background noise, the constancy of it dulling the overall sensation into one that was more like a severe case of pins and needles than anything else. “Yeah, mostly,” I said weakly.
“Well, I don’t mean to rush you or anything, but…”
I wasn’t the fastest flier. It was probably going to take me a minute or two to get back where I could be useful, which was worrying when a wrecking ball like Ikaris was back in play.
Druig was controlling the other Eternal. I was certain of it. But how had that happened? Gilgamesh had said that an Eternal had to willingly lower their mental defences and let Druig in, but as far as I knew, there was simply no way that Ikaris would have allowed that. The whys and hows didn’t really matter right now, though. Ikaris was too much—maybe the Ancient One could hold him off for a bit, but with Carol depowered, I was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone else here that could take him. I had to get back into the fight. Quickly.
Almost seemingly in answer to the thought, there was a blur of motion and Pietro was suddenly standing on the paving stones in front of me. “Hey,” he said, feigning a degree of casualness, though he was still breathing hard. “Need a lift?”
“Hey yourself,” I responded, wincing a little before pointing vaguely back in the general direction of Kamar-taj and tipping my head in a querying gesture.
He gave his head a small, sharp shake, his brow furrowed with worry. I noticed a trail of blood streaked across the side of his face and through his hair, from what I was hoping was a superficial gash on his temple.
“Right,” I said, then took a deep breath and floated down to him. “Please be careful with my ankle.” As Pietro let me settle into his arms, I wove a quick layer of telekinetic energy around my leg and foot to try to keep it from being jerked around too much.
As soon as he had a firm hold of me, Pietro moved. We tore through the city, speeding through cramped and narrowed streets, our surroundings smearing into an almost-unintelligible blur as I clenched my stomach to try to avoid the burst of extreme motion sickness that always came with my brother carrying me like this.
Five, ten, fifteen seconds…
…Then Pietro got checked by something—hard—and the world shifted violently around me, like the whole city had been grabbed by the collar and yanked sideways. The air cracked after us, late and wrong, and my internal organs suddenly slammed hard against the inside of my ribcage as they kept trying to go in our original direction. I came out of his arms like a skipping stone, and before I could even really process what was happening, the air went from empty to solid as I smashed face-first into a wall.
With effort, I pushed the pain away again, a small whimpery sort of groan escaping from my lips. My protection spell had held up fine against the impact, though I was feeling a little disoriented and my ankle was screaming at me. I really wanted to just lie there for a few more seconds, but knew that would be a mistake. Instead, I forced myself up out of a jumble of cracked and powdered pieces of masonry onto my hands and knees, muzzily lifting my head and looking around for Pietro. I spotted him almost immediately, just a short dozen metres away. He looked like he’d only barely managed to stay on his feet, his face twisted in a pained grimace. Standing just in front of him, however—seemingly having materialised out of nowhere—was another familiar figure.
Makkari.
Fucking hell. We really weren’t catching any breaks here.
